Original work by Caroline Devine
First light from a fellow traveller
This is an extract. The full piece is 5'15".
What might a star sound like, could we hear its movements. How might its gestures in a cold, vast vacuum reach across to us through a timeless expanse.
Following in the vein of Alvin Lucier's Sferics, 1981 the artist uses space as a compositional parameter in her practice. Working with an astronomy research team at the University of Birmingham she took data from the oscillations of the stars' surface, and processed it as sound.
To bring the movements within the range of human hearing, the artist transposed the tone structures into a sculpture of celestial architecture. Certain compositional parameters were applied to the data, until the natural progressions overlaps as discordant breaths and peeps that bend through time and space. Over cycles the breaths reform as an immense, yet proximate chamber, recalling oxygen-less kingdoms where the only birdsong is the machinations of the very technology that got us there.
The stellar frequencies, sonified as sine waves, reach us as data interrogated, pulled apart in order to expose sonic relationships between the natural overtones of the stars and the receiving ear, unfolding in a communique of light and sound.