Through this project I will explore the relationship between art and science from a seemingly absurd point of view. For that purpose I’ll be looking into scientific and artistic developments towards that moment during which every paradigm changes, because someone, a person, a team or several teams collaborating, brought a new idea that rocked its own environment. Things that were there the whole time but could not be accessed yet, for any good reason - a starting point to the possible development of according methods into sound art and composition.

Throughout my career as a multi-faceted composer, sound artist and educator, and following a three-year artistic research project funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture, under the title “Poetics of Sound and Sonic Dramaturgy”, I have tried to work on the idea of predictability: looking at short and long-term cycles, technological advancement plus possible combinations and holes in the current state of the field, one might indeed question the adjective “futuristic” when describing new music, and replace it with “probabilistic”. Indeed, the complexity of any composition lies in the combination of many simple things, which seemingly expand at each step of its creation, from emission to reception. Also, most new music, and most new sounds might somehow be anticipated as the result of a specific advancement in technology and of specific trends in society, while expanding on a compiled history of already-made pieces.

The music from the future might be easily predicted then, but if so the real challenge consist of making the future unpredictable.

Now that is usually not the way one thinks about science, in which projection matters a lot. But if we were able to avoid the scientific trap, art could become a potential vector to approach the necessary poetry behind science. In order to reach the infinite small in a poetic way one might need a subjective ear, as visuals won’t be that stunning to say the very least, and possibly new techniques. Sound being the art of the invisible, it may have something to say about such disciplines as spallation (a way to extract neutrons from heavy metals in order to conduct various scientific experiments). Not just to document or illustrate it, but to get inspired by it, and bring it into another form. Same way as one can look into fermentation to define new rules of cooking, and subsequently of making art.

Hopefully we’ll find out how to capture that into sound and music, through installations and compositions of varied forms. The result could be sculpted into blocks of white noise. It could be made of bombarded particles generating new material. It could be made for buildings, for worms, for distant moons of distant planets, or for neutrons as an audience in its quest to develop new possibles.

The research will be conducted at Malmö Academy of Music in relation with ESS (European Spallation Source), a nuclear research facility in Lund.