Music from the Worm Farm: Neurobiology meets new music
Can worm brains tell us something about our own? Can music be inspired by worm research, illuminating the intricate interplay between synapse and mood?
Music from the Worm Farm was a fascinating and experimental collaboration, drawing on science and music to explore the connections between the brain and the body, and between ways of doing scientific research and composing music. It was a research and development residency project, involving composer Keith Johnson and neurobiologist Dr Stephen Nurrish. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project culminated in a public performance of the musical work, performed by ensemble [rout] and pianist Philip Howard at the Dana Centre in the Science Museum in March 2009.
Keith composed two bodies of work in the eight months he was resident in the Nurrish Lab; A book of mutants for the piano, 18 mutated versions of a short piece by Bach, and two works for ensemble [rout] which use research data to control the integration of two songs, one by Mahler and the other by Joni Mitchell. Both were performed at the concert, and the composer’s blog below chronicled their genesis.
Stephen Nurrish’s lab in the MRC Cell Biology Unit at University College London uses tiny worms to research how brain chemistry relates to movement. Keith Johnson has been working in the lab and responding to the ideas and processes they use.
Stephen Nurrish said: “My lab studies how brain cells talk to each other – the release of chemicals from one brain cell to another causing a change in the receiving brain cell. One such chemical in the human brain is called serotonin, and having too little serotonin is thought to lead to abnormal behaviours such as depression, aggression, eating disorders, and alcoholism. If we could better understand what effect serotonin has on brain cells then we could design new, more specific drugs to treat depression.
“We investigate how serotonin works by using the small nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism. C.elegans also uses serotonin in its much simpler brain (302 cells versus over 10 billion in humans) and we have identified genes that are needed for serotonin's effects in receiving brain cells. These genes are also present in humans. We continue to search for more genes required for serotonin's effects and to understand how the genes we've already found work.”
Keith Johnson commented: “For a composer, the idea of how brain states relate to behaviour is enormously intriguing. The mechanism whereby moods or ideas communicate themselves from interior states into external manifestations is a source of real creative fascination for me. Music has long been thought to have privileged access to internal states of being, either as an expression or as a trigger of them. There is also a sense in which music possesses an innate physicality, not just because it sometimes makes us want to move and movement is often necessary for its performance, but because it can have a kind of form that embodies ideas.
“These ideas of the mental and physical are embodied through the transformations that particular musical ideas undergo in a particular work. For instance, the piano music I have been writing has been a response to the use in the lab of deliberate mutations to their model organism. They use these to examine the internal workings of the motor neuron. I’ve made systemic changes at root level to various different musical parameters to generate mutations in my own model organism, The C major Prelude from The Well-tempered Clavier Book 1 by Bach, to explore the ideas of musical locomotion and mood.
The ensemble pieces Porous with travel fever / PMA and serotonin and Still ist mein Herz / Aldicarb take this further, using data from experiments that focus on how the worms move, to control the bringing together of the final part of Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler, and Hejira by Joni Mitchell. The first song ends in a state of static acceptance and contentedness, the other is powered by a discontent that expresses itself in movement. Their combination serves to explore the relationship between movement, stillness and mood in a more sophisticated way, both musically and conceptually.
“As part of the project, we created a CD to document some of the work. It contains some of the very first electronic studies I made, some pieces from A book of mutants played by Philip Howard and Blue light/ white flags, an electronic piece developed from one part of Still ist mein Herz/ Aldicarb. More details can be found below at http://www.wormusic.info/2009/04/music-from-worm-farm-cd.html.”
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Music from the worm farm CD
The first six tracks on the CD are from the series of electronic studies that I did right at the beginning of the residency. Called Protein or Protein Chain (there are a number of each) after the actual subject of the Nurrish lab's research, they are isolated components of the C major Prelude from JS Bach's 24 Preludes and Fugues, Book 1. Each one separates out individual pitches and assigns each one a different instrumental sound. The result is that each is rhythmically distinct and each arrangement slightly different.
protein chain 1
protein chain 7
protein I
protein chain 3
protein chain 8
protein chain 10
The Aldicarb assay quintet takes the Bach piece as its source material too, but its structure is determined by data from the lab: c. elegans on aldicarb, a chemical that gradually paralyses the worms.
Aldicarb assay quintet
The piano pieces that follow are again different versions of the Bach Prelude, comprising seven of the eighteen pieces in A book of mutants, played here by Philip Howard. Some are simple mutations like the Pedal mutant, others more complex like the Double spiral mutant, but all are inspired by the lab's use of genetically modified worms. Sometimes these are variations of the 'wildtype', but sometimes they are transgenic animals with DNA from other organisms: the two pieces with an X are combinations of the structure and patterning of the Bach which holds melodic and harmonic information from elsewhere. The lab concentrates on different forms of locomotion, as a way of finding out about serotonin, so this is what I have done also: I focussed on breaking up the pattern of the Prelude and the way it progresses.
Pedal mutant
Heterophonic mutant
BachXSatie
Unsynchronised mutant
BachXBeethoven
Bag of worms mutant
Double spiral mutant
Blue light/white flags is again an electronic study, this time from the end of the project. It combines elements of two songs that I used to make ensemble pieces that were played in the concert in the Dana Centre on the 19th of March. Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler and Hejira from the album of the same name by Joni Mitchell. This piece uses a version of the rhythm guitar from Hejira which has been sculpted down using data from the lab. From the Mahler it takes the instrumentation and the changes in tempo.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Entry No.16, 27-3-09
The performance of the music from my residency was last week at the Dana centre. Here's some pictures, taken by Tony Wilburn.
Paul Whitty and an impressive amount of cabling.
The Dana centre, ready and waiting.
Stephen Nurrish and I, waiting for things to get going as well.
Philip Howard at the piano.
Stephen introducing his research.
And here I am introducing mine.
A visitor watching Sarah Carne's blog intervention.
And ensemble [rout], playing Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin.
Here's some live recording of Philip Howard playing:
Non-repeating mutant
Paul Whitty and an impressive amount of cabling.
The Dana centre, ready and waiting.
Stephen Nurrish and I, waiting for things to get going as well.
Philip Howard at the piano.
Stephen introducing his research.
And here I am introducing mine.
A visitor watching Sarah Carne's blog intervention.
And ensemble [rout], playing Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin.
Here's some live recording of Philip Howard playing:
Non-repeating mutant
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Sarah’s entry: 19.3.09
Experiment in movement.
When Keith asked me to make a new work the brief was very open. It had merely to be in response to his Research and Development residency at the Nurrish Laboratory. Coincidentally, although he didn’t know it, I’d already been thinking about movement in my own work but only as the very small germ of an idea.
My starting point for this project then was to read Keith’s blog and to go the lab and meet Steve and the worms. The first I approached with some trepidation – although I am virtually a blog virgin my instinctive response is they’re not really my thing and I feel the same about Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, though I do know they all serve different purposes and it’s a totally knee-jerk reaction rather than an educated critical response. Alongside this I’m not a fan of having to write artist’s statements–I can see that sometimes they may be useful as a way in to interpreting a work but as the author of them I feel its a fine line between being too simplistic or downright pretentious – the whole thing makes me very self-conscious. But – it turned out I found reading the blog quite painless. It gave me insight into his methods and I also loved the inserted films – it showed YouTube to be a potential source of research material and just made me laugh. When I later asked Keith how he’d approached writing the blog he said he saw it as extended programme notes – this also made sense.
The trip to the lab was similarly illuminating and the two things combined gave me a starting point and a framework for my own filming. My aim became to achieve a piece of footage which replicated somehow the sense of excitement and awe I felt when looking down the microscope at the lab at the worms; it would take a few moments to focus and then there they were and sometimes they were bright green. Previously my ideas about movement had been inspired by an aerial view of the millennium bridge but I rapidly realised this was too wide a focus and in order to control or interfere with the movement would require too much time and outside help - as I understand it Steve is engaged in research which may take twenty years to lead to something directly useful to humans. For my own experiment I was thinking three days, ie till the funding ran out, so it couldn’t be too ambitious in terms of scale.
Unfortunately my visit to the lab had to be cut short when normal life intervened but rather than returning on another occasion I took this fact as the determining framework for the context of my filming. I knew I wanted to do something to do with movement and both logistically and conceptually it made sense to work within a restricted location and limited frame. So - the scientists take the c elegans worm for their model organism, (which appealed to me because of the mundane fact that it was originally discovered in a compost heap in Bristol) and they monitor the worm’s response by changes in movement; Keith has used Bach’s Prelude and Fugue and applied the scientist’s data to alter the composition, and I decided to use marbles. Having determined my laboratory would be my home they firstly fitted domestic usage, secondly there’s something about the cat’s eye at the centre of the glass which is reminiscent of Steve’s lit up worms, and thirdly they roll.
The final factor was deciding to use Keith’s mutant compositions of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No 1. On a rubbish new year’s day lunchtime at work I was reading the blog and listening to the Bach Mutants – this is Keith’s text for the Aldicarb Assay duet:
‘So, what I did was to take this data and apply it to my own model organism. This little study that I made demonstrates the effect: the bassoon sound represents the level of paralysed worms. The rate at which the bassoon sound takes over the music from the piano is determined by the data. In the experiment that supplied this data all the worms ended up paralysed by the end.’
What resonated for me was the image of the worms becoming paralyzed alongside the sheer beauty of the Bach and the bassoon. Bach has always been the one composer who makes me feel you cannot despair when listening to him –any day with Bach in it is an ok day with me even if the poor old worms are dying.
So, at home, I set up the camera with a small downward focussed frame and I rolled marbles through a variety of substances. I filmed in snow, grass, flour, water and honey. The snow was obviously not planned in advance and isn’t included as technically the exposure was a disaster. The flour had some interesting moments but was eventually jettisoned for the sake of keeping the final piece a reasonable length: YouTube can only accommodate ten minutes at one time. The grass I kept because I particularly like the noise of the aeroplane, the water has moments where I feel I actually achieve my original aim and the honey makes me laugh – I was honestly surprised when they didn’t roll – and I really like the percussive noises as they hit the plate.
I also discovered when reviewing the footage that I liked the background ambient noise as it reminds me of the mutterings of Glenn Gould when playing the Bach and so this has stayed in. I also like the internal/external public/private quality of the final film and where it is sited which seems to tie in with some of the ideas Keith talks about in previous entries. I had no idea in the beginning of how I would end up presenting this film; what started off intending to be an experiment in the filming of movement has actually also become about an experiment in presentation.
What I’ve enjoyed about this project has been trying to allow the process to determine the outcome. Though I haven’t attempted to apply data with the same rigorous labour as Keith and my marble rolling is about as far from a scientific approach as you can get I have tried not to tweak or rub out too much. There have been some happy outcomes by chance –for instance I like the decrease in quality that occurs through YouTube, the pixelisation and the strange pulse and there are maybe a few moments where I achieve the visual moment I was hoping for. I also like the fact that you can’t deny the hugely important part the music plays – I think its only right that any real credit should go to Bach first and Keith second.
When Keith asked me to make a new work the brief was very open. It had merely to be in response to his Research and Development residency at the Nurrish Laboratory. Coincidentally, although he didn’t know it, I’d already been thinking about movement in my own work but only as the very small germ of an idea.
My starting point for this project then was to read Keith’s blog and to go the lab and meet Steve and the worms. The first I approached with some trepidation – although I am virtually a blog virgin my instinctive response is they’re not really my thing and I feel the same about Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, though I do know they all serve different purposes and it’s a totally knee-jerk reaction rather than an educated critical response. Alongside this I’m not a fan of having to write artist’s statements–I can see that sometimes they may be useful as a way in to interpreting a work but as the author of them I feel its a fine line between being too simplistic or downright pretentious – the whole thing makes me very self-conscious. But – it turned out I found reading the blog quite painless. It gave me insight into his methods and I also loved the inserted films – it showed YouTube to be a potential source of research material and just made me laugh. When I later asked Keith how he’d approached writing the blog he said he saw it as extended programme notes – this also made sense.
The trip to the lab was similarly illuminating and the two things combined gave me a starting point and a framework for my own filming. My aim became to achieve a piece of footage which replicated somehow the sense of excitement and awe I felt when looking down the microscope at the lab at the worms; it would take a few moments to focus and then there they were and sometimes they were bright green. Previously my ideas about movement had been inspired by an aerial view of the millennium bridge but I rapidly realised this was too wide a focus and in order to control or interfere with the movement would require too much time and outside help - as I understand it Steve is engaged in research which may take twenty years to lead to something directly useful to humans. For my own experiment I was thinking three days, ie till the funding ran out, so it couldn’t be too ambitious in terms of scale.
Unfortunately my visit to the lab had to be cut short when normal life intervened but rather than returning on another occasion I took this fact as the determining framework for the context of my filming. I knew I wanted to do something to do with movement and both logistically and conceptually it made sense to work within a restricted location and limited frame. So - the scientists take the c elegans worm for their model organism, (which appealed to me because of the mundane fact that it was originally discovered in a compost heap in Bristol) and they monitor the worm’s response by changes in movement; Keith has used Bach’s Prelude and Fugue and applied the scientist’s data to alter the composition, and I decided to use marbles. Having determined my laboratory would be my home they firstly fitted domestic usage, secondly there’s something about the cat’s eye at the centre of the glass which is reminiscent of Steve’s lit up worms, and thirdly they roll.
The final factor was deciding to use Keith’s mutant compositions of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No 1. On a rubbish new year’s day lunchtime at work I was reading the blog and listening to the Bach Mutants – this is Keith’s text for the Aldicarb Assay duet:
‘So, what I did was to take this data and apply it to my own model organism. This little study that I made demonstrates the effect: the bassoon sound represents the level of paralysed worms. The rate at which the bassoon sound takes over the music from the piano is determined by the data. In the experiment that supplied this data all the worms ended up paralysed by the end.’
What resonated for me was the image of the worms becoming paralyzed alongside the sheer beauty of the Bach and the bassoon. Bach has always been the one composer who makes me feel you cannot despair when listening to him –any day with Bach in it is an ok day with me even if the poor old worms are dying.
So, at home, I set up the camera with a small downward focussed frame and I rolled marbles through a variety of substances. I filmed in snow, grass, flour, water and honey. The snow was obviously not planned in advance and isn’t included as technically the exposure was a disaster. The flour had some interesting moments but was eventually jettisoned for the sake of keeping the final piece a reasonable length: YouTube can only accommodate ten minutes at one time. The grass I kept because I particularly like the noise of the aeroplane, the water has moments where I feel I actually achieve my original aim and the honey makes me laugh – I was honestly surprised when they didn’t roll – and I really like the percussive noises as they hit the plate.
I also discovered when reviewing the footage that I liked the background ambient noise as it reminds me of the mutterings of Glenn Gould when playing the Bach and so this has stayed in. I also like the internal/external public/private quality of the final film and where it is sited which seems to tie in with some of the ideas Keith talks about in previous entries. I had no idea in the beginning of how I would end up presenting this film; what started off intending to be an experiment in the filming of movement has actually also become about an experiment in presentation.
What I’ve enjoyed about this project has been trying to allow the process to determine the outcome. Though I haven’t attempted to apply data with the same rigorous labour as Keith and my marble rolling is about as far from a scientific approach as you can get I have tried not to tweak or rub out too much. There have been some happy outcomes by chance –for instance I like the decrease in quality that occurs through YouTube, the pixelisation and the strange pulse and there are maybe a few moments where I achieve the visual moment I was hoping for. I also like the fact that you can’t deny the hugely important part the music plays – I think its only right that any real credit should go to Bach first and Keith second.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Entry No.15, 17-3-09
In Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin, the Joni Mitchell material tends to dominate, mostly because of the guitar part, but partly because I chose to keep the tempo from Hejira. The tempo in Der Abschied changes rather a lot, from section to section, and is also played with a great deal of rubato, or flexibility in the tempo from moment to moment. In changing the material to emphasise the mood/motion qualities, I also ended up using the Mahler material at half the speed of the Mitchell – ie one beat of Abschied = two of Hejira – which means the Mahler sounds more backgrounded. So for my next pass at combining the two songs, I decided to superimpose them at the same speed, one beat=one beat, and to take the tempo from the Mahler, changes and all.
One of the main problems I had found when writing Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin was the volume of material: even after sculpting each song down according to the data there was a lot of music left which was difficult to squeeze in given the limited number and the kind of instruments at my disposal. So this time I decided to include a virtual instrument: a pre-recorded, chiselled away skeleton of the rhythm guitar from Hejira. This turned out to be both useful and problematic in different ways. Here’s a taster of it: you can hear how the tempo changes.
Guitars excerpt
It was problematic because when you combine pre-recorded instruments with live ones synchronisation becomes difficult: particularly when the tempo is changing so often. The technical solution here was to have a click-track, a kind of metronome which records all the tempo changes which only the conductor can hear. This is what they do when recording film music which needs to be synched exactly to the action. And that’s why if you come to the concert, Paul Whitty who’s conducting, will be wearing headphones.
Like in Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin, I needed to hack away at the material to make it manageable, and I wanted to use research data again to do this. One of the things that I felt was lacking in the first piece was a relationship between the way in which each source was edited. So in the next piece, I decided to use only one source of data: I chose some more wormtracker data, this time from worms on aldicarb, the vermicide I mentioned before. Here is the master graph that I ended up with:
You’ll notice that there are two lines, one the inverse of the other. That means that there’s always the same amount of overall material, but that the proportion from each source varies. The red is Mahler and the blue is Mitchell: as one decreases the other increases and vice versa. In this piece I decided to use the material unchanged as well, without the emphases I had made for the first one.
The last thing I did was to use the graph to determine the level of dynamic too: how loud or soft each instrument is playing. This has the effect of increasing the contrast beween the two sources. I gave the finished piece the title Still ist mein Herz/ Aldicarb (this translates as My heart is quiet, a line from the Mahler song).
The final effect of these two pieces is a strange one: the two sources are so different, and yet in some ways quite similar. There are times when the combination is uncomfortable, unresolved, and times where they mesh astonishingly well. Both these outcomes, to me, are equally valid. One of the results of making music in the way I have done here is that you are often driven into making ‘unmusical’ decisions: ones that go counter to your instincts as a composer. These are, to me, the strongest moments in the works as they are ones that reveal most clearly both the integrity of the process, and the context of your own musical culture.
One of the main problems I had found when writing Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin was the volume of material: even after sculpting each song down according to the data there was a lot of music left which was difficult to squeeze in given the limited number and the kind of instruments at my disposal. So this time I decided to include a virtual instrument: a pre-recorded, chiselled away skeleton of the rhythm guitar from Hejira. This turned out to be both useful and problematic in different ways. Here’s a taster of it: you can hear how the tempo changes.
Guitars excerpt
It was problematic because when you combine pre-recorded instruments with live ones synchronisation becomes difficult: particularly when the tempo is changing so often. The technical solution here was to have a click-track, a kind of metronome which records all the tempo changes which only the conductor can hear. This is what they do when recording film music which needs to be synched exactly to the action. And that’s why if you come to the concert, Paul Whitty who’s conducting, will be wearing headphones.
Like in Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin, I needed to hack away at the material to make it manageable, and I wanted to use research data again to do this. One of the things that I felt was lacking in the first piece was a relationship between the way in which each source was edited. So in the next piece, I decided to use only one source of data: I chose some more wormtracker data, this time from worms on aldicarb, the vermicide I mentioned before. Here is the master graph that I ended up with:
You’ll notice that there are two lines, one the inverse of the other. That means that there’s always the same amount of overall material, but that the proportion from each source varies. The red is Mahler and the blue is Mitchell: as one decreases the other increases and vice versa. In this piece I decided to use the material unchanged as well, without the emphases I had made for the first one.
The last thing I did was to use the graph to determine the level of dynamic too: how loud or soft each instrument is playing. This has the effect of increasing the contrast beween the two sources. I gave the finished piece the title Still ist mein Herz/ Aldicarb (this translates as My heart is quiet, a line from the Mahler song).
The final effect of these two pieces is a strange one: the two sources are so different, and yet in some ways quite similar. There are times when the combination is uncomfortable, unresolved, and times where they mesh astonishingly well. Both these outcomes, to me, are equally valid. One of the results of making music in the way I have done here is that you are often driven into making ‘unmusical’ decisions: ones that go counter to your instincts as a composer. These are, to me, the strongest moments in the works as they are ones that reveal most clearly both the integrity of the process, and the context of your own musical culture.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Entry no. 14, 13-3-09
Stephen and I have recorded a podcast talking about our project: here is the link
UCL podcast
We start talking about 2 fifths of the way through.
UCL podcast
We start talking about 2 fifths of the way through.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Entry No.13, 9-3-09
One of the first decisions I had to make when I started writing these pieces was this: both the sources I was using had singers, and texts. Should I use one or two, or no, voices in my piece? I decided to take what seemed like the riskiest course of excluding the voices and texts altogether. Mostly because I wanted to focus on the musical processes that were at work, which, though made explicit by the texts in some ways, are also somewhat obscured by them in others. And anyway, I thought, the texts are always there for people to find if they really want to know them. I still retained the musical content of the voice parts, though, as that was a significant part of what defined the musical process.
So, at this point I had all my material transcribed and some of it already developed along the lines I described in the last entry; I had made some key decisions about the final outcome, and I had a good idea of the instruments I had at my disposal: soprano saxophone, electric violin and guitar, double bass and keyboard. All I had to do now was find some way of making this all fit together.
About this time I was talking to Andrew Porter, a PhD student in the lab. He was developing some software called wormtracker which uses video footage of the worms to record their motion, changes in position and speed. This seemed interesting to me as any information that is related to change over time has musical potential. He kindly sent me some of this data, which I decided would be a good way to control the way in which my two sources could be combined. Because the concept driving the choice of material was the relationship between mood and motion, and the fact that I had developed the material to a certain degree already to emphasise the contrast between the two pieces, it seemed a natural step to use actual data from experiments exploring these ideas too.
I had a few data sets, from worms that had been put on a variety of substances that effected their levels of serotonin and therefore locomotion. I chose two sets: one from worms on PMA (phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate), a chemical that acts on a certain protein pathway inside the motor neuron cell with the effect of making the worms move more speedily, and one from worms on serotonin itself which makes the worms remain rather still.
At first I tried using X and Y co-ordinates of the change in position to govern changes in the source material, but having two data points for every musical one seemed unconvincing and conceptually clunky, so I ditched that idea after wrestling with it over Christmas. I then realised that the best way of using the data was to extract the speed of each worm at each given point.
This is a graph that shows the combination of the two data sets, the pink one is the worm on serotonin, the blue one on PMA. The serotonin data changes more frequently but stays more or less in the same range: the worm is quite still and not moving very much so the changes are small. The PMA worm has a wider variety of speeds as it is more agitated.
I transformed the numbers slightly to give me a percentage over the range of different speeds for each point, and used that number to determine the percentage of musical material from either source that was present in each bar, which as you can see from the graph varies from almost zero to 100%. Thus the pink line controls Der Abschied and the blue one Hejira. Once I had sculpted down each song, all that remained for me to do was to superimpose them and arrange them for the ensemble. Here’s a taster of the computer version, though it will sound quite different when [rout] play it. I decided to call it Porous with travel fever/ PMA and serotonin.
Porous with travel fever/ PMA and serotonin (extract)
I'll explain what I did next for the other piece next time.
So, at this point I had all my material transcribed and some of it already developed along the lines I described in the last entry; I had made some key decisions about the final outcome, and I had a good idea of the instruments I had at my disposal: soprano saxophone, electric violin and guitar, double bass and keyboard. All I had to do now was find some way of making this all fit together.
About this time I was talking to Andrew Porter, a PhD student in the lab. He was developing some software called wormtracker which uses video footage of the worms to record their motion, changes in position and speed. This seemed interesting to me as any information that is related to change over time has musical potential. He kindly sent me some of this data, which I decided would be a good way to control the way in which my two sources could be combined. Because the concept driving the choice of material was the relationship between mood and motion, and the fact that I had developed the material to a certain degree already to emphasise the contrast between the two pieces, it seemed a natural step to use actual data from experiments exploring these ideas too.
I had a few data sets, from worms that had been put on a variety of substances that effected their levels of serotonin and therefore locomotion. I chose two sets: one from worms on PMA (phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate), a chemical that acts on a certain protein pathway inside the motor neuron cell with the effect of making the worms move more speedily, and one from worms on serotonin itself which makes the worms remain rather still.
At first I tried using X and Y co-ordinates of the change in position to govern changes in the source material, but having two data points for every musical one seemed unconvincing and conceptually clunky, so I ditched that idea after wrestling with it over Christmas. I then realised that the best way of using the data was to extract the speed of each worm at each given point.
This is a graph that shows the combination of the two data sets, the pink one is the worm on serotonin, the blue one on PMA. The serotonin data changes more frequently but stays more or less in the same range: the worm is quite still and not moving very much so the changes are small. The PMA worm has a wider variety of speeds as it is more agitated.
I transformed the numbers slightly to give me a percentage over the range of different speeds for each point, and used that number to determine the percentage of musical material from either source that was present in each bar, which as you can see from the graph varies from almost zero to 100%. Thus the pink line controls Der Abschied and the blue one Hejira. Once I had sculpted down each song, all that remained for me to do was to superimpose them and arrange them for the ensemble. Here’s a taster of the computer version, though it will sound quite different when [rout] play it. I decided to call it Porous with travel fever/ PMA and serotonin.
Porous with travel fever/ PMA and serotonin (extract)
I'll explain what I did next for the other piece next time.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Entry No.12, 2-3-09
The two pieces I chose to work with as my material in the pieces for [rout] have a quite clear relationship between mood and movement. But other than just play them, I was to start with at a bit of a loss to know what to do.
So first, I decided to try and identify those qualities in each piece that expressed these things: the static contentedness in the Mahler and the edgy restlessness of the Joni Mitchell.
I found soon enough that there were in Der Abschied certain sections that interested me more: particularly the end ones so I decided to focus on those. The things I found that expressed this stillness most clearly were a kind of rocking motion, alternating between two notes, and a subtle heterophonic doubling or tripling of lines, particularly involving the vocal line, and the harmonic blurring this results in. And in the very last part of the Mahler, the harmony lands on the added sixth chord that gives it the strange floating sense of restfulness.
In Hejira, as I mentioned, the restlessness is technically pretty lowkey, and its subtlety easily disrupted. I found a peculiar version by Chaka Khan which ups the tempo and reinforces the beat to make a disco version, and in the process, contrary to what you might expect, destroys the restlessness and movement I find in the original. Here it is:
I worked quite a bit on the Mahler score by taking those qualities and exaggerating them: pushing the static quality and underplaying the dynamism, but felt I wasn’t really getting anywhere. Once I had transcribed Hejira – quite a task in its own right! – I tried to do a similar thing, but again, struggled to find a worthwhile route to a larger piece. I had at that point thought of doing two pieces, one based on each song, but then it occurred to me to perhaps use them both in the same work.
The first thing I needed to establish then, was that it was worth it at all, so I superimposed them, just to see what it would be like. These two pieces are incredibly familiar to me: I’ve been listening to them regularly for about 30 years, so it was difficult for me to hear them as one thing rather than just the two together. So, like a visual artist looking at their work in a mirror to get a different view, I reversed the two songs before I stuck them together. The result actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and made me think I was on the right track. Here it is: you have to try and ignore the backwardness of it.
Deihcsbarijeh
How I actually started to put them together I’ll tell you next time.
So first, I decided to try and identify those qualities in each piece that expressed these things: the static contentedness in the Mahler and the edgy restlessness of the Joni Mitchell.
I found soon enough that there were in Der Abschied certain sections that interested me more: particularly the end ones so I decided to focus on those. The things I found that expressed this stillness most clearly were a kind of rocking motion, alternating between two notes, and a subtle heterophonic doubling or tripling of lines, particularly involving the vocal line, and the harmonic blurring this results in. And in the very last part of the Mahler, the harmony lands on the added sixth chord that gives it the strange floating sense of restfulness.
In Hejira, as I mentioned, the restlessness is technically pretty lowkey, and its subtlety easily disrupted. I found a peculiar version by Chaka Khan which ups the tempo and reinforces the beat to make a disco version, and in the process, contrary to what you might expect, destroys the restlessness and movement I find in the original. Here it is:
I worked quite a bit on the Mahler score by taking those qualities and exaggerating them: pushing the static quality and underplaying the dynamism, but felt I wasn’t really getting anywhere. Once I had transcribed Hejira – quite a task in its own right! – I tried to do a similar thing, but again, struggled to find a worthwhile route to a larger piece. I had at that point thought of doing two pieces, one based on each song, but then it occurred to me to perhaps use them both in the same work.
The first thing I needed to establish then, was that it was worth it at all, so I superimposed them, just to see what it would be like. These two pieces are incredibly familiar to me: I’ve been listening to them regularly for about 30 years, so it was difficult for me to hear them as one thing rather than just the two together. So, like a visual artist looking at their work in a mirror to get a different view, I reversed the two songs before I stuck them together. The result actually made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and made me think I was on the right track. Here it is: you have to try and ignore the backwardness of it.
Deihcsbarijeh
How I actually started to put them together I’ll tell you next time.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Entry No.11, 23rd February.
I said before Christmas that I was going to attempt to get some of the Bach mutants recorded. This was frustrated by a number of things but I have now – with the help of pianist Philip Howard – managed to do just this. One of the main reasons I wanted to do this was because at the end of this project – looming rather rapidly now – I will be giving away a CD of work composed during the residency.
There’s a rationale, beyond just getting the music to an audience, for this. It relates to the issue of internal/external that I mentioned last time. Right from the beginning I knew – because of the nature of the research the Nurrish Lab do – that I would have to consider this. One of the main differences, musically, between the internal and the external relates profoundly to the way people USE music. It can be both intensely private and explosively public. The difference is a culturally sensitive one as anyone who has had to tolerate someone playing music loudly on the tube, for instance, will know. I very early on decided that there would be two creative outcomes from this project, a public one – the concert on the 19th of March at the Dana centre – and a CD for private listening.
So I chose a small number of the mutants – the choice was determined by a quality of interiority they shared. I was going to post them on this blog, but I decided I would like to keep some of my powder dry for the performance and the CD. The pieces were recorded in a tiny room in UCL which was somewhat noisier than I had anticipated, though, so there is one that will have to be re-recorded. I thought I might share this slightly substandard version of the BachXSatie mutant as a little taster, and also the Double spiral mutant as Philip played it brilliantly, but I decided it was perhaps too vivacious for including on the CD.
As I hoped, the pieces really do come alive in the hands of a real human being. I deliberately left a lot of decisions to the pianist: there are no tempo or dynamic indications at all (just like the Bach in fact), so there are any number of possible versions. Philip will be playing his own interpretation of all 18 of the mutants at the concert, so if you want to hear more, please do come along. If you would like a copy of the CD when it’s ready, please email me (click the link under 'contact' to the right) and I will either post it to you or email you MP3 versions if that suits you better.
BachXSatie
Double spiral mutant
.
There’s a rationale, beyond just getting the music to an audience, for this. It relates to the issue of internal/external that I mentioned last time. Right from the beginning I knew – because of the nature of the research the Nurrish Lab do – that I would have to consider this. One of the main differences, musically, between the internal and the external relates profoundly to the way people USE music. It can be both intensely private and explosively public. The difference is a culturally sensitive one as anyone who has had to tolerate someone playing music loudly on the tube, for instance, will know. I very early on decided that there would be two creative outcomes from this project, a public one – the concert on the 19th of March at the Dana centre – and a CD for private listening.
So I chose a small number of the mutants – the choice was determined by a quality of interiority they shared. I was going to post them on this blog, but I decided I would like to keep some of my powder dry for the performance and the CD. The pieces were recorded in a tiny room in UCL which was somewhat noisier than I had anticipated, though, so there is one that will have to be re-recorded. I thought I might share this slightly substandard version of the BachXSatie mutant as a little taster, and also the Double spiral mutant as Philip played it brilliantly, but I decided it was perhaps too vivacious for including on the CD.
As I hoped, the pieces really do come alive in the hands of a real human being. I deliberately left a lot of decisions to the pianist: there are no tempo or dynamic indications at all (just like the Bach in fact), so there are any number of possible versions. Philip will be playing his own interpretation of all 18 of the mutants at the concert, so if you want to hear more, please do come along. If you would like a copy of the CD when it’s ready, please email me (click the link under 'contact' to the right) and I will either post it to you or email you MP3 versions if that suits you better.
BachXSatie
Double spiral mutant
.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
10th entry, 19-2-09
I haven't posted for a while as I've been so busy composing, about which, more below. But first I thought I would explain why it is that I write music in the way that I do, as it’s after all not necessarily the obvious way to go about it.
I used to write music the way you might expect, coming up with notes from (seemingly) nowhere. I always found this very hard: I never had a natural instinct or feeling for notes on the page. Over time I became less and less interested in what you might call the composerly virtues: manipulation of musical material in an abstract way. Sometime in the 90’s I started modelling my work on other pieces, predominantly by Schubert. When I got my first computer capable of running music software some years after that, my work changed radically and for a while I only wrote directly into sound.
I gradually became aware that what I was interested in most was the meaning constructed by a work: it’s cultural specificity and the nimbus of association and concepts surrounding it. This idea arose out of my teenage experience of listening to and trying to understand the work of Mahler: it always seemed to me to be a kind of coded template of experience rather than a musical ‘argument’, and much the more powerful and compelling for it. This project has very much confirmed this approach for me: it has made complete sense to use the Bach piece as a ‘model organism’, and the ideas of mood and motion have been conjured up by the Joni Mitchell and the Mahler in a much more sophisticated and nuanced way than if I had used my own material. Talking of which…
Das Lied von der Erde - The Song of the Earth – is an orchestral song cycle. The last movement, Der Abschied – The Farewell – is the longest and most complex of all of them. It’s in actual fact two songs put together, and it’s the second of these that I have used in my ensemble pieces. The text is from a Chinese poet, Wang Wei, via several translators into French and then German, with some additions from Mahler himself (all the texts are readable here). At the end of the 19th century many western artists became fascinated with the culture of the Far East; Monet, Whistler, the Jugendstil artists, Debussy and so on. In Mahler’s case, it seemed to appeal to him as a way of reconciling his existential disillusionment with western culture and religion. In the final moments of Der Abschied, the music relaxes into an ‘oriental’ pentatonic scale, coming to rest on a chord that was radical in its day as an ‘unresolved’ chord. It’s also held an extraordinarily long time, with the word ‘ewig’ (forever) repeated seven times. This is one of the main reasons I chose it as a musical text, to embody this sense of repose and contentedness after a restless search.
“In early 1976, Mitchell traveled with friends who were driving cross country to Maine. Afterwards, Mitchell drove back to California alone and composed several songs during her journey which would feature on her next album, 1976's Hejira. " (Wikipedia). As I understand it, this was in part due to a painful, failed relationship. The title song doesn’t speak about this explicitly, though some of the other songs on the album do. What it does concern itself with, is movement. “I’m traveling in some vehicle”, the song begins. This motion is clearly prompted by discontent: “a defector from the petty wars that shellshock love away”. Musically, the restlessness is understated, but profound: it changes key periodically (C# minor, B major) and is built of shifting accents and predominantly falling lines. The rhythm guitar is in two voices, one on either side of the stereo field, each playing almost identical parts – heterophony, a technique that Mahler also utilizes in Der Abschied - which gives a subtle, constant prompting forward. The very high and melodic bass that forms a wordless duet with Joni’s singing propels the song along in the way it syncopates and stays only just within the harmonic boundaries of each key. The almost subliminal hand drumming further keeps the impulse forward.
So these are the two pieces I chose to use in order to write a more substantial piece for ensemble [rout] to play. They are strangely similar in some ways, but radically different in others, and this presented me with a huge difficulty. I quite quickly realised that this was also partly to do with a quality I hadn’t consciously grasped but which also relates to the c elegans research, namely the relationship between internal and external states. The Mahler is a very public work. The text itself is a conversation, and in performance – as you can see from the youtube version linked below – it’s a big affair: a huge orchestra (including a mandolin!), and a woman in a big dress at the front, singing in the classical, projecting manner. Hejira, in contrast is almost like an internal monologue: the voice is quiet and understated, the instrumentation restricted and intimate, existing predominantly as a recording for private listening. Interestingly, even in live performance, the song achieves a kind of haunting solitude.
By its nature, the piece that I was about to write would have to be public and eschew this kind of intimacy. I came to an accommodation with this in the end, and I will tell you how later, but next I’ll tell you what I actually did to make the two works “Porous with travel fever / PMA and serotonin” and “Still ist mein Herz / Aldicarb”.
I used to write music the way you might expect, coming up with notes from (seemingly) nowhere. I always found this very hard: I never had a natural instinct or feeling for notes on the page. Over time I became less and less interested in what you might call the composerly virtues: manipulation of musical material in an abstract way. Sometime in the 90’s I started modelling my work on other pieces, predominantly by Schubert. When I got my first computer capable of running music software some years after that, my work changed radically and for a while I only wrote directly into sound.
I gradually became aware that what I was interested in most was the meaning constructed by a work: it’s cultural specificity and the nimbus of association and concepts surrounding it. This idea arose out of my teenage experience of listening to and trying to understand the work of Mahler: it always seemed to me to be a kind of coded template of experience rather than a musical ‘argument’, and much the more powerful and compelling for it. This project has very much confirmed this approach for me: it has made complete sense to use the Bach piece as a ‘model organism’, and the ideas of mood and motion have been conjured up by the Joni Mitchell and the Mahler in a much more sophisticated and nuanced way than if I had used my own material. Talking of which…
Das Lied von der Erde - The Song of the Earth – is an orchestral song cycle. The last movement, Der Abschied – The Farewell – is the longest and most complex of all of them. It’s in actual fact two songs put together, and it’s the second of these that I have used in my ensemble pieces. The text is from a Chinese poet, Wang Wei, via several translators into French and then German, with some additions from Mahler himself (all the texts are readable here). At the end of the 19th century many western artists became fascinated with the culture of the Far East; Monet, Whistler, the Jugendstil artists, Debussy and so on. In Mahler’s case, it seemed to appeal to him as a way of reconciling his existential disillusionment with western culture and religion. In the final moments of Der Abschied, the music relaxes into an ‘oriental’ pentatonic scale, coming to rest on a chord that was radical in its day as an ‘unresolved’ chord. It’s also held an extraordinarily long time, with the word ‘ewig’ (forever) repeated seven times. This is one of the main reasons I chose it as a musical text, to embody this sense of repose and contentedness after a restless search.
“In early 1976, Mitchell traveled with friends who were driving cross country to Maine. Afterwards, Mitchell drove back to California alone and composed several songs during her journey which would feature on her next album, 1976's Hejira. " (Wikipedia). As I understand it, this was in part due to a painful, failed relationship. The title song doesn’t speak about this explicitly, though some of the other songs on the album do. What it does concern itself with, is movement. “I’m traveling in some vehicle”, the song begins. This motion is clearly prompted by discontent: “a defector from the petty wars that shellshock love away”. Musically, the restlessness is understated, but profound: it changes key periodically (C# minor, B major) and is built of shifting accents and predominantly falling lines. The rhythm guitar is in two voices, one on either side of the stereo field, each playing almost identical parts – heterophony, a technique that Mahler also utilizes in Der Abschied - which gives a subtle, constant prompting forward. The very high and melodic bass that forms a wordless duet with Joni’s singing propels the song along in the way it syncopates and stays only just within the harmonic boundaries of each key. The almost subliminal hand drumming further keeps the impulse forward.
So these are the two pieces I chose to use in order to write a more substantial piece for ensemble [rout] to play. They are strangely similar in some ways, but radically different in others, and this presented me with a huge difficulty. I quite quickly realised that this was also partly to do with a quality I hadn’t consciously grasped but which also relates to the c elegans research, namely the relationship between internal and external states. The Mahler is a very public work. The text itself is a conversation, and in performance – as you can see from the youtube version linked below – it’s a big affair: a huge orchestra (including a mandolin!), and a woman in a big dress at the front, singing in the classical, projecting manner. Hejira, in contrast is almost like an internal monologue: the voice is quiet and understated, the instrumentation restricted and intimate, existing predominantly as a recording for private listening. Interestingly, even in live performance, the song achieves a kind of haunting solitude.
By its nature, the piece that I was about to write would have to be public and eschew this kind of intimacy. I came to an accommodation with this in the end, and I will tell you how later, but next I’ll tell you what I actually did to make the two works “Porous with travel fever / PMA and serotonin” and “Still ist mein Herz / Aldicarb”.
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