Capturing the sound of light

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

Jo Thomas with her Golden Nica statuette at the Prix Ars Electronica Gala (Image: Golden Nica Digital Musics & Sound Art)

?It looked like a huge spaceship,? says the woman sitting opposite me as she fiddles with a string of pearls. ?It was something I?d never seen before.?

The flying saucer-like structure that so amazed sound artist Jo Thomas is actually the Diamond Light Source. This synchrotron accelerator, in Oxfordshire, UK, played host to Thomas for six months while she explored its potential as an inspiration for her work. The project culminated in the production of a 38-minute-long sound piece called Crystal: Diamond Light Source, which won the Golden Nica for Digital Music and Sound Art at Ars Electronica last weekend in Linz, Austria.

Thomas didn?t know what a synchrotron was when she was first invited into the space. She soon learned that there is a lot of shared ground between this beam of electrons, giving off a type of light known as synchrotron radiation, and the micro-sounds that she works with in her art &hndash; ?tiny, tiny glitches and blips of less than a second?.

The sounds used to monitor the electron beam giving off this light are what captured her imagination. Researchers Guenther Rehm and Michael Abbott at Diamond Light Source worked with Thomas, showing her the audio output used to monitor the beam. ?You could hear what was happening on the electron beam, live,? she enthuses. ?It was all about light and the speed of light. It was very rhythmic as well. Everything that music should be.?

Thomas heard more than just light in the audio feed though. ?I wanted to concentrate on the phonemic detail in the pure data - that?s the vocal detail. It isn?t present but you can sculpt it &hndash; they did sound like this chorus of voices anyway so I took them out and streamed them together and built this vocal block.? By combining this audio feed from the beam with recordings she made of the ambient noise in the synchrotron?s hallways she created ?this massive body of sound? that is Crystal: Diamond Light Source.

Knowing the origins of the sounds makes them all the more mesmerising while they conjure images of an alien landscape in your mind: sometimes industrial, sometimes biological, sometimes organic.

But as other-worldly as the resulting artwork is, Thomas had to keep her feet on the ground when going into the ?huge spaceship?. ?You have to be really tough to be honest, really focussed: ?I?m here to do this and I?m going to do this? - because people have different attitudes,? she says. ?If you?re there in a space like that you have to have an absolute belief in your work and what you do to make sure you don?t crumble.?

For Thomas, the experience has changed how she will create music. She seemed less sure whether the scientists at Diamond got so much out of the exchange. ?I think they enjoyed it,? she says. ?But I?m not sure it?ll change their lives forever. They just saw me walking around with a tape recorder and headphones.? Yet perhaps donning their own headphones to immerse themselves in the sounds of her work will give the researchers new insights into their own.

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2323439b/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A120C0A90Ccapturing0Ethe0Esound0Eof0Elight0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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