Chasmata project at M-Matisse Community Workshop, University College London (UCL)

Last May, my colleague José López-Montes presented at University College London, within the M-Matisse Community Workshop, our project Chasmata, in representation of both, the Royal Conservatory of Music Victoria Eugenia of Granada and the Conservatory of Music Rafael Orozco of Córdoba, Spain.

The M-Matisse mission (Mars Magnetosphere Atmosphere Ionosphere and space weather SciencE) is a candidate currently study by European Space Agency, which main scientific goal is to unravel the complex and dynamic couplings of the Martian Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Thermosphere with relation to the Solar Wind and the lower atmosphere. Derived directly from our project Chasmata, we presented From Data to Art: Chasmata and the Sonification of the Martian Atmosphere and Ionosphere in a Multidisciplinary Cultural Event.

We had the opportunity to talk about the artistic and scientific singularities of our project in its many details, centering in our personal focus from orographic data sources and processing, visual art with Martian orography, data sources for sonification extracted from Mars Express MARSIS, features of Martian ionograms and opportunities for sonification. We talk also about the sonification methodology, specially granular synthesis as a main sound resource, programming languages and procedures, such as mapping spectrum to sound grains, time granulation, frequencies, amplitudes, stereo panning, mapping auxiliary functions, reading pixels and writing Csound scores. We presented as well some sonification results via spectra comparison and published sound and source code.

You may want to learn about this presentation here: