You’ll have to take my word for it: car crash composition

Brian House created You’ll have to take my word for it, in which he sonified a car crash. In 2011, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray had a car accident but survived unharmed. The dubious circumstances in which the accident happened led to an investigation and the car’s black box data were made public. House used a slice of 20 seconds of the data just before the crash and used these data in a five-minute composition for two electric guitars and saxophone. A repeated B on the first electric guitar represents the percentage that the accelerator is floored. The faster the car goes, the faster the guitar plays the note. The second guitar plays continuous arpeggios who’s speed is dependent on the RPM of the car. The tenor saxophone follows the overall accelerating motion of the car. This is made explicit by a slowly rising melody in C-Lydian.When the car crashes, the temporal scale changes and one second of data amounts to 30 bars. At this moment, the saxophone plays solo in a blues scale in A the contortions of the car as its flips over before coming to a rest.

House used a slice of 20 seconds of the data just before the crash and used these data in a five-minute composition for two electric guitars and saxophone. A repeated B on the first electric guitar represents the percentage that the accelerator is floored. The faster the car goes, the faster the guitar plays the note. The second guitar plays continuous arpeggios who’s speed is dependent on the RPM of the car. The tenor saxophone follows the overall accelerating motion of the car. This is made explicit by a slowly rising melody in C-Lydian.When the car crashes, the temporal scale changes and one second of data amounts to 30 bars. At this moment, the saxophone plays solo in a blues scale in A the contortions of the car as its flips over before coming to a rest.

House describes how this piece addresses data and reality: “There is no evidence of wrongdoing in the circumstances surrounding the Lt. Governor’s crash. Yet whatever “really” happened sits somewhere in the gap between data, political spin, the Internet, and sudden kinetic violence on the interstate.”