ALICE / ATLAS / OPERA

The album is inspired and based on a field recording sent to me by Rosa Menkman from the Centre de calcul / Data Centre (Building 513) during her residency at CERN.

I used a PD patch fed with open data sources accessed over VPN via a Virtual Machine from CERN for each track / experiment respectively and frequency triggers "controlled" by Rosa's field recording to send MIDI signals to GarageBand.

Like the scientist at CERN cannot decide beforehand the outcome of their experiments I could't control the exact melody movements or harmonics with this setup — arbitrariness that I struggled with at first and wasn't sure about. However, one can determine how the nature and property of matter and energy are measured and interpreted – likewise I set the ensemble and translation and determined how the data provided would eventually sound. I realised that herein lies the compositional act with these pieces.

(Big thanks to Rosa Menkman! Without her this work wouldn't have come into existance.)