Kin_ (Cultura Plasmic INC) is blogging for us as our Artist of the Month for July. In this entry, she discusses her interest in connecting natural material to the digital uses we give it today, and how ‘minerals’ can become music.
For my audio-visual piece Crystalline Unclear, premiered at a digital screening with Cryptic in early 2021, I was interested in how sound could be used to create a temporal experience of something seemingly static – a piece of quartz crystal. Of course, geological matter – like rocks, minerals and crystals – is not static, but to our sense of time, these substances appear as solid and unchanging. One of the appeals of sonifying data is that it can give rise to these alternative sensory experiences that momentarily move away from our everyday perception, and we can explore something from a different perspective. It highlights the limits of human perception and reminds us of what lies beyond our immediate comprehension.
I was interested in exploring quartz because of its significance to the development of communications technologies, that being an area my work often relates to. Quartz has become known for its piezoelectric properties – the ability to produce an electric potential when subject to mechanical pressure, turning it into a kind of mini battery. This, along with its ability to oscillate at a consistent high frequency, has meant that quartz has become an essential component in the silicon semiconductors now used in computers and time-keeping devices. Although a lot of the quartz used for these purposes is now manufactured synthetically, I found it to be really fascinating that this mineral from the Earth’s crust is at the heart of today’s digital devices. It bridges this illusory divide between ‘technology’ and ‘nature’.
When light is shone through a crystal, it produces diffraction data which reveals the atomic inner structure of that crystal. It is a method of identification and one that acts almost like a fingerprint of that substance. Crystalline materials are notable for their highly ordered inner structures; they are predictable, repetitive, precise and homogenous so using the creative process to introduce some noise and flexibility that countered this rigidity was appealing. To form a metaphorical critique of pattern recognition, the quartz crystal had an undeniable pull.
I had started thinking about ideological readings of materials with which we construct our worlds and an essay by Esther Leslie, ‘Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality: a utopian interlude’ (2005) drew my attention to some examples:
// the phosphorescent gleam explored in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the temptations of consumerism;
// Edgar Allan Poe’s aversion to the disorienting effects of mirrors used in Western domestic décor, ‘potent in producing a monstrous and odious uniformity’;
// the transparency of glass that Paul Scheerbart (1914) theorised could imbue our relationship with the outdoors with a new empathy and yet with a fragility that could imply a moral leaning;
// the strength and legacy of stone used to concretise architectures of power;
// surrealist visions emerging from contradictions and differences, e.g. fire and ice, and Andre Breton’s linkage of the self with carbon, ‘a mineral state prior to consciousness’ (Leslie: 112).
How might a sonic interpretation of quartz crystal reflect on the ideologies of current machine learning technologies and their dependency on pattern recognition?
Starting with some diffraction data, I imported it into opensource data sonification application https://app.twotone.io/ and set it to play in Aeolian mode (quartz having a hexagonal crystal structure and Aeolian being the sixth music mode). I then imported this into Spear, a tool for spectral analysis and re-synthesis, and experimented with shifting the frequency so that some sections would begin at 327.68hz (a subdivision of the frequency 32768hz that quartz vibrates at). This became the core sonic material that I would construct the piece with.