Intro to the book edited by historian J. Frank Dobie.  I am reading from the Project Gutenberg version of Legends of Texas (1924).

Intro to J. Frank Dobie's Legends of Texas

By Mary J. Sutherland.  From the J. Frank Dobie (ed.) book Legends of Texas (1924).

Treasure Chest on the Nueces

Reading of "Mysterious Music in the San Bernard River" by Bertha McKee Dobie, from LEGENDS OF TEXAS edited by J. Frank Dobie

Mysterious Music in the San Bernard River

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year.  I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day.  Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside.  I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up.  The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"Houston Winter"

I used the body temperature data from 11/3/87 to 2/27/88 for “Houston Winter”, a piece for wind quintet.  The complete data set comprises the clarinet line, while the oboe and flute also play the data in a canon four measures apart.  The horn plays a pedal point, and the bassoon plays an obbligato.  This piece was also played "live" here in Austin by Wild Basin Winds in the spring of 2008, literally 20 years after I had collected the data.

Houston Winter

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year. I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day. Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside. I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up. The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"First Quarter, 1988":

This piece is for flute and cello.  The cello line is the result of my teenage experiment in data sonification.  As in another piece, “Houston Winter”, it is the encoding of my daily basal body temperature, measured in 2/10 of a degree (range 97.0 to 98.2 degrees F), and converted to a C minor pentatonic scale.  Each measure is a calendar week, and each beat of the 7/4 meter is a day in chronological order from January 1, 1988 to March 31, 1988.  Notes longer than a quarter note represent more than one consecutive day with that same temperature reading.

First Quarter 1988

As a teenager in Houston, I experimented with data sonification by recording my body temperature in two-tenths-degree intervals each morning for almost a year.  I then converted the data to a pentatonic scale, each temperature degree corresponding with an octave and one note with each day.  Figuring that out was about as much as my then-15-year-old brain could handle, so I put it aside.  I found the data almost 20 years later (now a yellowing page of graph paper), and I decided to work it up.  The data worked up into 3 pieces, 2 of which premiered on WKCR's Afternoon New Music radio program.

"Spring Branch Fanfare"

This piece has not been played anywhere yet.  This is basically the rest of the body temperature data, from April Fool's Day 1988 onward.  It's in a modified rondo format:  intro, AABBAACCAADDAA, coda.  It's scored for 3 trumpets, 2 horns, 2 trombones, and 2 tubas.  The body temperature data is pretty much unmodified from how it fell out in ABCDcoda linear form.  The 7/4 time signature was intentional, one quarter note per day, one measure per week.  The April Fool's joke was on me-- the A section is unchanged, untouched from the original data-- and I was stunned, jaw-dropped, with how
good and "right" the data sounded, at least for that section.

Spring Branch Fanfare

Last 3 stanzas of W. H. Auden's A Summer Eve, #255 in Samuel West's #PandemicPoems . Used to illustrate (reflecting a Twitter exchange) that "alarm" and "calm" don't rhyme for everyone!

Auden's "alarm" and "calm" don't always rhyme!

Very part-time composer/arranger, lay Dominican, very Texan.  ASCAP member. 
 Opinions and postings all my own.

Cherilyn Young

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