What does the sonification of David Bowie sound like? You can find out as part of the brand new science programme at the Port Eliot Festival, which takes place 28-31 July 2016 in St Germans, Cornwall.
Dr Alexis Kirke, who is Senior Research Fellow in Plymouth University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR), and Martyn Ware, sonic pioneer and founding member of both the Human League and Heaven 17, joined forces to create the ‘Sonification of David Bowie’ as part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s ‘David Bowie is’ events.
Before playing his and Martyn’s pieces at Port Eliot, Alexis will present a talk explaining ‘sonification’, how he and Martyn composed the works, and what they might tell us biographically about Bowie.
Alexis and Martyn analysed numerical data relating to album sales, key modes and lyrics up to the end of the 1980s, and transformed them into musical sonifications. Alexis mapped statistical analyses of lyric emotion and sales onto musical features such as tempo, pitch and loudness and transformed into independent sonic compositions. Martyn combined the analysis of the keys of Bowie’s songs together with album sales to create his “strangely beautiful” piece on an EXS24 synthesizer.
To analyse lyric emotion, a scientific databases of over 15,000 annotated words were used, giving scores based on their emotional positivity (valence) and emotional physical intensity (arousal). This was cross-referenced with a time-ordered database of Bowie’s lyrics. The resulting valence and arousal measures were then filtered in an attempt to find longer term patterns, which to Alexis’s surprise seemed to exist.
Since the original V&A exhibition, Alexis has extended his sonifications to include much of Bowie’s later output. He will be presenting the resulting music for the first time at the Port Eliot Festival.
Plymouth University is a Creative and Cultural Partner of the Port Eliot Festival.