by Kira Grunenberg
In the past, genres and sub-genres have kept an amount of order and association with different combinations of instruments, tempos, arrangements, hooks, and artificial enhancements. Today, however, genre lines are becoming blurred and things like ‘genre-common instrumentation’ are less hard and fast rules and more like light, initial guidelines now. For example, in reggae music, a genre with roots tracing back to the “1960s…[with] its foundations in the USA and Africa,” (such as defined in A History of Popular Rock Music, by Piero Scaruffi), if following traditional reggae form, one would not expect to hear that a band declaring themselves in the genre, composed music with the help of a telescope used by NASA “to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems,” (as per the official NASA Kepler Mission Guide FAQ).
That’s right. Groundbreaking, research driven, space-scanning technology has now become fair game as a tool to help compose a band’s everyday song. The New Jersey based group, called Echo Movement, worked with the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab and the Kepler telescope’s star scanning abilities to create original music.
Bruce Walker, a professor within the Georgia Tech School of Psychology, explained to Space.com (via Space on MSNBC), that the “Sonificiation Lab receives a lot of requests to convert scientific data into sound but [that Echo Movement's idea] was truly unique.”
The telescope observed a particular binary star, titled “Kepler 4665989,” to record the data resulting from changing levels of brightness and dimming brought on by its partner star coming in and out of its track. The head of the project, psychology student Riley Winton, explained to “Space on MSNBC” how the the process worked: “[The] numerical values were loaded into our Sonification sandbox software to create sequences of sonified musical pitches.”
After adding in data from a second star, “Kepler 10291683,” to form a tremolo and reduce the ‘digital character,’ of the sounds, Echo Movement merely looped and harmonized them into four parts – culminating in a six second tune to be used within a longer song, set for release in September. Echo Movement member, David Fowler, stated that the band “…wanted something completely off the chart.”
Space telescopes might not be part of traditional reggae instrumentation, but with so much technical “icing” in the mainstream nowadays, Echo Movement at least gets major points for using technology that is lightyears apart from tablet apps.
You can download Echo Movement’s Six Second Star Melody star-powered loop via Georgia Tech’s website.
Kira is an old school music nerd with a love for all things creative; always searching for music’s common ground. She graduated with an M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University. Drop her a tweet @shadowmelody1
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