Sonification: the element of surprise

All composers work within constraints. Even such an absolutist control freak as Wagner never wrote a top D for a Heldentenor because he knew the outcome wouldn’t be great. I would go further and say that most composers (certainly since Monteverdi) actually enjoy the stimulus of the constraints presented, for example, by the nature of particular instruments and the way they are played, even by particular players. The constraint is an opportunity, a source of inspiration. At the same time music that is performed is a provisional art, there is no definitive execution of any work. Most composers embrace this lack of absolute control, and enjoy the fact that their pieces are interpreted. These are the conventional ‘limitations’ that arise from the composer–notation–performer matrix. However, some composers enjoy constraints and handing over of control in the compositional process itself, and I am among them. I enjoy structural and processual constraints in composition, and I particularly enjoy handing over control of all or aspects of the compositional process, for the simple reason that doing so produces results which I could not have imagined. I am also interested in how a musical piece may relate to the environment it inhabits, and all these three have drawn me to sonification. I have discussed an early piece of mine, Meter, in my essay about real-time sonification in this journal. In that piece I used sonification in a performance context. I would now like to talk about two other sonifications, one which produced material for a composition, the other which used sonification to reveal states in a building to its inhabitants. 1 Chesterfield starfield