2016

Sounding Tides FAQ

What is it?

Sounding Tides is a kinetic sound sculpture that uses historical data (the rising and falling of the tides) to produce hypnotic music and cymatic patterns in water.

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What Is Data Sonification?

Most representations of data are visual (think line graphs, pie charts, or bar charts). They allow us to see trends and patterns that aren’t obvious just from looking at a list of numbers. Instead of visual means, Data Sonification uses audio to represent the data. It takes the ‘0s’ and ‘1s’ and translates them into sound and music. Data Sonification is used by organisations like NASA as a new way of experiencing data.

In Sounding Tides, the record of tide heights from Brisbane river is represented sound waves, noise, and piano samples. In addition, you can also see the data being represented as vibrations in bowls of water.
 

Where does the Data come from?

Sounding Tides uses tidal records that span the period 1970 to 2018 measuging the rising and falling tides at the mouth of the Brisbane River.

We have used the TPXO Global Tidal Model[1] that contains tidal data from 1970 – 2018. It measures the height of tides along the coastline of every country in the world. We have sampled historical data for Brisbane from the lat lon of -27.346157, 153.201023 which is the closest lat lon in the model to the Curiosity festival site. That is the mouth of the river you are looking at.

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What am I listening to?

You are listening to a composition by Erik Griswold.
It consists of three layers 1) a swelling chord produced by sine wave generators 2) whooshing noise sounds and 3) a recording of gently flickering piano music. The tidal data controls the three layers in different ways: by changing their volume, by filtering the highs and lows, and by adding and subtracting harmonics.

 

The tides are played in a highly accelerated form, so we can get a sense of a larger scale of time. Each pulse represents one high tide, or 12.5 hours. 1 months of data = 5 mins of music; 1 year of data = 1 hour of music. 10 hours of data - one decade.  Every month of data there is a shift in the music, to signal the passing of time.

 

What is happening in the bowls?

The tidal data is being fed into low oscillators, which are transmitted through transducers into the bowls. The low frequency vibrations produce ripples patterns in the water. This is sometimes known as “cymatics.” 

 

What is the difference between the five sculptures?

The different heights of the sculptures represent rising global mean sea level.

Each bowl sonifies a different decade of data. From right to left you hear and see the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s.  So you can see and hear in realtime how the different decades compare.

 

Can we hear the climate changing?

Climate change creates impacts like extreme weather, more intense cyclones and ocean and river inundation. Climate change influences tides in different ways; as the sea level rises, even when it doesn’t rain, kings can make local flooding in coastal areas. Cyclones, tsunamis and extreme weather events also cause higher tides. In our sonification, higher tides are louder and have higher tonal spectra. In other words, the higher the tide, the louder, brighter and richer the tone.

How does it work?

A computer feeds the tidal data through a series of synthesisers and samplers. These sounds are sent to a transducer and a speaker in each sculpture. The transducer creates the low vibrations and the speaker plays the musical composition.

 

What about the app?

The app has the same data that is in sculpture with the same three sound layers. However you can control the mixture of sounds, and also change the speed. It lets you sound your own tides!