This academic year so far the Sound Arts Guest Lecture Series have been really inspiring, my favourite in particular and the one that related the most to my current portfolio project was the lecture by Helen Anahita Wilson. She is a researcher at SOAS University of London and has also won the Oram Award to the innovation of sound and music. She has also been working in improving hospital radio specially since she was sadly diagnosed with cancer and during her recovery.
Her work creating music with plants was the most interesting for me in relation with my project, as in my interactive installation I will be using plants as sensors to play sounds. I found interesting her explanations about biomusic, where she talked about working with plants as gathering the data that they generate, and she was very clear stating that plants doesn’t generate music themselves but the manipulation of different reactions like slight cracks in the wood of trees or electrical conductivity can be used to create patterns, and with the artist’s help using these sequences to drive electronic instruments the music can be created. In my case I will be using the electromagnetic field of the plant, as I mentioned before, making use of Biotron, and translating it to MIDI data.
Working with plants, trees and acoustic ecology in general is inspiring and fun, and having a related artist in this field was really interesting.
