Alexis Kirke
Martyn Ware (b. 1956, UK)
Career Sonification of David Bowie, 2011

This is a quite bizarre project that generates data sets from various aspects of David Bowie’s career (album sales, lyrical valence of his songs etc.) and presents them as music whose pitch or tempo or some other aspect is generated from the aforementioned data set. Them there is something humorous or ironic about representing musical career not through the sound of that music but as sound generated on the basis of some numerical analysis of various career parameters.

I include this for two reasons 1) I am also experimenting with “what sound can be used for”; 2) I have a general interest in medium-transcending transformations… And well, 3) I do have a penchant for absurd or unexpected juxtapositions that forces one to think, detours into terra incognito where are no clear rules yet and you need to actively work out how to relate and how to react to what you are experiencing. Perhaps this “3)” is even the most important one. Like an invitation to use a photo-concertina as a sonic score for unprepared audience that has spent some time discussing it in terms of identity and other unrelated matters, as I did in “Stray Jam”…