String Quartet
Performance by Quatuor Danel, December 2013: Performers - Marc Danel, Gilles Millet, Vlad Bogdanas, Guy Danel

Nina Whiteman Cloud Fragments (Quatuor Danel)

World premiere performance by Ealing Youth Orchestra, conducted by Leon Gee.

Dark Matter is the terra incognita in the mapping of space.

Invisible to the human eye and scientific instruments, Dark Matter emits no light, scatters no light, and is transparent. 

Dark Matter remains elusive to astronomers and physicists, who have been working to illuminate its make-up for nearly eighty years. 

Dark Matter does not consist of atoms, and is not formed of substances currently known on Earth.  Numerous theories suggest it may variously consist of particles such as neutrinos, MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects), WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and supersymmetric particles. Many of these particles are not (yet) proven to exist.

In a series of workshops, we asked:

What is the sound of Dark Matter?
-	If we can’t see it, could we hear it? And what would it sound like?
	
Working with images and text from scientific research into Dark Matter, the orchestra explored sounds, textures, characters, interactions and trajectories. Following these experiments with the sonic potential of the science, Dark Matter Sounding took shape with a focus on ‘translating’ the properties of mysterious/imaginary particles into sound:

WIMPs interact weakly
MACHOs bend light
Neutrinos oscillate
Supersymmetric particles can only be created or annihilated in pairs

Images from the ground-breaking research of scientist Vera Rubin, provided visual impetus, and were used to generate the structure of the piece. Her diagram of galaxy rotation (the earliest proof of the existence of Dark Matter) appears as a graphic score in Dark Matter Sounding. The players in this section interpret lines, curves, and dots in place of standard music notation.

Dark Matter Sounding is a voyage into the unknown…a journey through an impossible landscape…an exploration of imagined possibility… 

©Nina Whiteman 2014



Dark Matter Sounding was commissioned by Ealing Youth Orchestra and the London College of Music, supported with funds from the Ambache Charitable Trust, the Leathersellers’ Charitable Fund, the Penny Trust, and RNCM Research. 
The work was first performed on 1 March 2014 at St. Barnabas Church, Pitshanger Lane, Ealing, London.


Dark Matter Sounding

First movement - From the Wingbone of a Swan.
Commissioned by the Valborg Choir, The Netherlands.

From the Wingbone of a Swan - I. Prelude to Speech

Final movement - From the Wingbone of a Swan.
Commissioned by the Valborg Choir, The Netherlands.

From the Wingbone of a Swan - III. Paleolithic Flute

Music for 88 keys is the first example of a composition based on the sonification and remix of materials property data from the online computational materials repository AFLOWLIB, the heart of the materialssoundmusic project.The sonification algorithm behind Music for 88 keys maps the materials information into sound by encoding data into MIDI events in an automated high-throughput fashion. The sonic data are fed to audio generating patches written for MAX and Ableton Live through a DataPlayer app. See www.materialssoundmusic.com for more info. 
Recording, editing and mastering: Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli
Recorded in the studios of the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication
of the University of Texas at Dallas on April  10,17 2015

Postludio

Continuo

Preludio

Andante

Performed live by Vlad Bogdanas (va), Guy Danel (vc). Manchester, 17-02-11. World premiere. 

Programme note:

The waggle dance is a movement performed by honey bees to communicate the location of a food source. A figure-of-eight movement with a waggle (or vibration) in the middle tells their co-workers both the direction in which to fly, and the distance from the hive of the flowering plant. The dance is a process of recruitment that ensures all bees collect pollen methodically, and from the same plants. 
 
This piece draws on the movements of the waggle dance (namely circles, and vibrations), and maps them onto different aspects of string-playing technique: bowing, fingers, melodic shapes, rhythmic units. I have also incorporated ideas from a range of scientific research papers, including one that gives detailed information regarding the sounds made by bees during their dances (Wenner, Sound Production during the Waggle Dance of the Honey Bee, 1960).

Waggle Dances is the first in a projected series of pieces inspired by honey bees - a much under-valued insect that enables human survival, yet is continually put in danger by human activity (including the use of pesticides, and modern methods of mass farming).

N.W.

Waggle Dances (viola and cello, Quatuor Danel, 2011)

DNA is an abstract sonic reading of Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Musical materials draw on her practice as an X-ray crystallographer, the infamous photo 51, and the web of personal stories entwined in the controversy surrounding Crick and Watson’s model and subsequent Nobel prize.

I am grateful to Nature Publishing Group for permission to use fragments of text from two articles (by Crick/Watson, and Franklin/Gosling) published in Nature (April, 1953).


DNA (mezzo soprano, 2013)

Marco Buongiorno Nardelli is Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, a  composer, flutist, a computational materials physicist, and a member of CEMI, The Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, and of iARTA, the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Physics, a founding member of the AFLOW Consortium and a Parma Recordings artist. 
materialssoundmusic is a new computer-aided data-driven composition (CADDC) environment based on the sonification and remix of scientific data streams.

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