O Coro dos Minerais: poetic sonifications of minerals

O Coro dos Minerais (The Mineral Choir) is a residency project at the Museum of Mines and Metals in Belo Horizonte. As part of the Comciência program, I was selected with other artists to do a residency around the collection and the theme of the museum, using parts of their collection. Given the pandemic, some artists like me worked completely remotely and got help from the staff through Zoom sessions. With the Mineral Choir, I wanted to create sonification of minerals.

The Poseidon Project and Fault Trace

The Poseidon Project and Fault Trace are two works by David Johnson. Both works are sonifications of seismic data but they are quite distinct.

The Poseidon Project

The Poseidon Project uses 100 years of seismic data, sourced from the United States Geological Survey (which is a really good source for seismic data and geological data in general).

Massachusetts Geophonic

Massachusetts Geophonic is an application by Arvid Tomayko to sonify the geological nature of Massachusetts. Arvid Tomayko uses data from the USGS Massachusetts geological map as a palette on which the user can place markers to ‘travel’ over the map.

Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony

Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony is an installation by Mathilde Lavenne that wants to be a meditation on the afterlife. Using a light sensor, the colour intensities on a black and white marble column are read and fed into the sound engine. Using marble, Laverne wants to convey a sense of solemnness.

Rock Music: Granular and Stochastic Synthesis based on the Matanuska Glacier

Moving from social media to environmental data, today I discuss Mara Helmuth’s Rock Music, a sonification of the melting of an Alaskan glacier.

Mara Helmuth uses data from sediment granulation in a lake formed by the melting of the Matanuska glacier in Alaska during a 24-hour period. Time, grain size and grain frequency were measured and mapped onto parameters for waveform, additive, granular and physical modelling synthesis.