Ed Wrzesien's new project, "Choas Atlantis," is a generative music program developed by Wrzesien that uses oceanic data to create ambient music. Ed explains: "My idea was to pull ocean marine data from the NOAA data buoy website and feed that data into sound generating algorithms. I ended up using the music programming language, Supercollider, to create the sounds. Starting simple, I began using the water and air temperatures to choose the tonic pitches of my tone arrays. If the air temperature was 79.4 degrees Fahrenheit, I would multiply 79.4 * 10 to get a tonic pitch of 794Hz. I used the water temperature similarly to control the pitch of my more “noisier” sounds. The wait times between notes are divided by wind speed. For example, some sounds wait 5 seconds divided by wind speed before another sound is played; the higher the wind speed, the faster the tempo of the music. The dominant wave period is used to choose from several arrays of multipliers that make up different tonal scales. The wave heights are used to control amplitudes of oscillators in a variety of contexts. In short, this is a combination of data sonification and chance operations. All of it is steered by real time weather events."
It may just be the knowledge of how these sounds are created, but one gets the sense there are forces at work that are outside of our control, giving the music an almost ominous feel. Here's a soundcloud excerpt:
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