Reading through this Essay, please provide responses to these 3 discussion posts: 

Essay:  

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music

Reading through this Essay, please provide responses to these 3 discussion posts:

Essay:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music

Discussion 1: Brya

What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?

Technology

The music industry has seen major changes in doing things and this digital revolution has changed the methods and techniques of creating music to a huge extent. In the earlier century, the processes of making music were analog, but now studios and production companies have made transitions from analog to digital methods of creating music. These changes regarding technology and music methods would be hurting those of studios and production companies, and CEOs of these industries the most because in earlier century recording of music needed thousands of dollars and now with digital workstations software, it has made the recording process significantly easier and cheaper. Therefore, in the reading of Jao carren, the explanation regarding technology and music becomes more understandable in this new era of change. He wrote that Computers became instruments as early as 1951 when Australia’s first programmable digital computer produced the first musical tone generated by a machine. Within a few years later, the US computer pioneer Max Matthews, an engineer at Bell Labs, was writing programs for sound generation and introducing a new form of computer-generated music to the world.  

reference:

Jao, Carren. “Sonifying the world.” AEON, 2 July 2015. AEON, aeon.co/essays/
     how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music. Accessed 2 July
     2015.

Created : 03/24/21 05:40PM

Discussion 2: Anosh

What is the problem for which this technology is the solution?

“Musical sound also allows listeners to empathise with data, an impossible feat were it not for music’s emotive qualities (Jao, par. 29). “Sonifying the world” is Carren Jao’s effort to highlight the impact of music on the human and human mind, all while showcasing Chris Chafe’s work in finding music in everything around us using technology. In terms of the problem, Jao believes music enables listeners to see even the unnoticeable “aspects of the world” innately like a part of being (par. 5). Chafe’s comparison of music using data from the United States gross domestic product (GDP) and the sounds from carbon dioxide level, for example, led him to ‘feel’ the relation between economic progress and pollution as opposed to simply seeing the data (Jao, par. 6). “Music touches the deepest part of self” (Jao, par. 1). 

The problem, according to Carren Jao, is that we do not see “how the nature resonates with music inside us” (par. 5). Music is all around us; sometimes discarded as noise, yet present as the wind rushes through leaves (Jao, par. 8). Jao notes Chafe’s work saying even computers, “EEG machines” are as much of musical instruments as “bamboo angklung, Chinese gongs, and drums” (par. 22). The data-driven music, according to Chafe, also has a “story outside of the music that’s driving it” (Jao, par. 23). Music has provided life or “heartbeat” even to the technological world as demonstrated with Chafe and his associate Greg Niemeyer’s first data-driven music “Ping” (Jao, par. 13). Chafe and Niemeyer were even able to show plants breathing, taking in carbon dioxide, and releasing oxygen, with their data-driven music (Jao, par. 15). Jao points that the experience could even get visitors to have “increased consciousness” of the impact of human breathing as they observe the human breathing rate affecting the music (par. 16). Jao points to Chafe’s note that if the shutdown of Mexico City during the SARS epidemic was ‘sonified’, it could show the 5 percent drop in carbon dioxide level “when the world slowed down in the face of tragedy” (par. 20). Jao also highlights Chafe’s collaboration with neuroscientist Josef Parvizi, where they are working on using the technology to convert EEG readings from patients with seizures to create sound to identify seizures in comatose patients (par. 24). They hope to get a simple device to medics can use to identify seizures in minutes saving valuable time that could translate to human life (Jao, par. 25).

Anup Joshi

Works Cited

Jao, Carren. “Sonifying The World.” Aeon, 2 July 2015, aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

Discussion 3: Odil

The question, “Whose problem is it?”

In this week learning resources the authors discuss the related issues in technology and arts of music are the central to all human cultures throughout the history in time. This article “Sonifying in the World” by Carren Jao points out that sonifying data is not only artistic, but scientific value as well.  Therefore, the knowledge is that sounds are used scientifically, by reading the article. We will never be thought or know of the specific way how sounds “especially ambient, “noise” sounds could be helpful. But we didn’t think about how turning music data into sounds could be beneficial for like soothing stress and building both social and cultural bonds. The author Jao described how “sonifying” data, able to compare things by feeling them. Chris Chafe a director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA called as karma), was working on a project to turn natural sounds and data into music (Jao). Chafe explained how the movie “The Matrix”, he talks about the character Neo who went through a streams 1s and 0s that are like music data.  “Chafe with digital artist Greg Niemeyer found a way to listen to grow bamboo stalks “Oxygen Flute” (Jao). Chafe produced his first music piece called “Ping”, which digital artist Greg help to produced as well and displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Jao). Chafe noticed that there were visual similarities between Smog and the GDP but it was not awarded until he heard and saw the similarity by converting them.  The author Jao explained how the sound of music can affects on the human brain when exposed to it for instanced in the reduction of anxieties and the effects of the music when it comes to the lowering of tensions. From the attachment of individuals to the different genre of music indeed music takes an enormous percentage of people’s lives that is evident by the preference of persons to various type of music.

References

Jao, Charren. Sonifying the World. 29 November 2017. https://www.aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music.

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 1/11

A fountain on a timer drops a shower of water droplets every few minutes in Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia. Photo by Trent
Parke/Magnum

https://aeon.co/

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 2/11

Sonifying the world

W

hen

C

hris Chafe translates data into music,
listeners sway to the beat of seizing brains,
economic swings and smog

Carren Jao

We might never know when the first set of thuds, thumps and taps were strung
together to make music, or when people sang the first songs, but it is incontrovertible
that our lives are seeped in rhythms and beats. We tap our feet. We bob our heads. We
sing in the shower. Never mind that we might not even be able to carry a tune. We
join in because it feels good, because music touches the deepest part of the self.

�e British neurologist Oliver Sacks calls this mankind’s musicophilia. So innate is
the attraction that many non-European languages don’t even have a word that
translates as ‘music’. Instead, as the African ethnomusicology expert Ruth Stone at
Indiana University explains, such cultures wrap singing, drama, dancing and
instrumental performance into a ‘tightly bound complex of the arts’.

Even if musicians sometimes have trouble defining music, we know it is made up of
sound: vibrating objects (such as the vibrating string of a guitar) push molecules
outward, creating pressure waves that radiate from the source. Sound turned into
music plays the human brain: it helps to ease anxiety, lowering cortisol levels more

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 3/11

effectively than anti‑anxiety drugs. It fires the nucleus accumbens, a structure in the
primitive limbic system, triggering dopamine and the same burst of pleasure as
addictive drugs. And music builds social and cultural bonds – the lullabies of
childhood, love songs, the rousing hymns of battle all work to nurture intimacy and
cohesion in cultures around the world.

Unlike sex or hunger, music doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to everyday survival –
yet our musical self was forged deep in human history, in the crucible of evolution by
the adaptive pressure of the natural world. �at’s an insight that has inspired Chris
Chafe, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics (or CCRMA, stylishly pronounced karma).

In his intensive, data-driven endeavour, Chafe takes the unnoticed rhythms of the
natural world and ‘sonifies’ them, turning them into music – all the better to see how
nature resonates with the music inside us. By pulling music out of the strangest places
– from tomato plants, economic stats, even dirty air – he enables listeners to perceive
phenomena viscerally, adding a new dimension of understanding to otherwise barely
noticeable aspects of the world.

hen Chafe first ‘played’ data extracted from the United States gross domestic
product (GDP) alongside sounds derived from carbon dioxide levels, chills went up
his spine. ‘It turned out the graphs were so similar that, at one point, the data was so
tightly bound, I could hear a third [illusory] frequency,’ Chafe told me. Had he simply
looked at the graphs for GDP and carbon dioxide, Chafe might have noted its
similarity, but he wouldn’t have felt the way in which economic progress was so tightly
bound to pollution levels.

W

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 4/11

‘�ere’s music in just about everything,’ said Chafe, a sprightly 62-year-old, whose
eyes light up with intelligence. His voice has a bit of a surfer lilt thanks to his
upbringing in Walnut Creek, California, where KPFA’s radio waves turned him on to a
whole spectrum of music – not just classical, but world music, jazz and experimental.
‘It was ear-opening for a kid in suburbia to tune in and hear this other stuff called
music also,’ he says.

We spoke one morning in his cozy, cluttered office set on an idyllic knoll on the
Stanford campus, where years of work with fellow musicians have gifted his
vocabulary with phrases such as ‘it’s a gas’ and ‘off on a jag’, along with the more
conventional musical jargon of keys and scales. Wires snaked around the room,
connecting a Linux desktop computer to a Zeta electric cello, which Chafe plays, and
a 12-inch soundbar speaker. All in all, the message was clear: there is the music we
think of – songs on the radio, classical harmonies in concert halls. �en there is
ambient sound – the wind as its rushes through leaves. And there’s even the sound of
our imagination – recalled voices, audio tracks replayed in our memories. All this can
be music, as opposed to the more derogatory term ‘noise’.

Smog: using real-time data on levels of carbon dioxide, noise, temperature, humidity, light,
noise and volatile organic compounds from cities such as Jeddah and Dubai, this riff reflects
the sound of smog

In 1992, the US composer John Cage said: ‘�ere is no noise, only sound.’ Cage is
best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, during which listeners are treated to four

Aeon Magazine – Chris Chafe Smog

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 5/11

minutes and 33 seconds of… nothing. A performer gets up in front of an audience in
silence. Without a focus, listeners’ ears open to the ambient sounds instead.

To understand Chafe’s musical style, see the world as Neo
did in �e Matrix movies, through streams of 1s and 0s

Like Cage, Chafe challenges our concept of music. It doesn’t encompass only
earworms from the likes of Bruno Mars or Taylor Swift. It could also harbour more
experimental definitions such as Peter Brötzmann’s 1968 free-jazz octet ‘Machine
Gun’ (yes, that’s what it sounds like) or Steve Roden’s 2001 piece ‘A Quiet Flexible
Background for a Harmonious Life’, which is more like the hum of my refrigerator.
�is experimental genre is where Chafe’s music lies.

To understand Chafe’s musical style, see the world as Neo did in �e Matrix movies,
through streams of 1s and 0s. Phenomena that lend themselves to the treatment: the
contagion of microbes; the major causes of death in the 20th century; the most
profitable Hollywood films of the past five years. ‘�ere has been this conversion of
almost everything into some form of data,’ Chafe explained. Even sound.

Take a keyboard. It is classic piano keys attached to a loudspeaker box. When you
push the middle C key, it is pre-programmed to transmit a message to the
loudspeaker box to play the sound associated with the number 60. If you had
programming skills, you could re-associate number 60 with any sound – real or
imagined – from the plink of a woodblock to the bleep of a computer. In the most
basic sense, this is what Chafe does. With a free, open-source, downloadable program

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 6/11

for music called ChucK, he transforms eye-glazing data: clarinets to represent carbon
dioxide levels, for instance, overlaid with GDP data rendered in violins.

hafe’s first public piece of the data-driven kind, ‘Ping’, was created in 2001 with his
longtime collaborator, the digital artist Greg Niemeyer of the University of California,
Berkeley. �is exhibit for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art included eight
aluminium loudspeaker towers arranged something like Stonehenge with a big
steering wheel in the middle for visitors to move the speakers – and the sound: a
combination of plucked guitars and banged aluminium, a bit like drums during a
Chinese New Year parade. �is was the heartbeat of a technological world, what we
had been missing since the inception of the World Wide Web.

Another composition, ‘Oxygen Flute’ (2002), made photosynthesis sense-able. In this
installation, Niemeyer built a sealed chamber out of welded metal and translucent
silicone rubber. A metal walkway led visitors into the humid box where Niemeyer’s
team planted bamboo stalks and hid gas sensors throughout.

As the bamboo stalks grew, they would take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen,
which would be read by the sensors and transmitted to a nearby computer. �e
computer would then record the amount of gas in the air, measured in parts per
million, and trigger a program that modulates pitch and length of notes played by
simulated flute. In the background, the popcorn-like sound of thousands of snapping
shrimp recorded from Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey Bay filled in the silent
spaces.

Aeon Magazine – Chris Chafe Oxygen Flute

C

http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 7/11

Greenhouse effect: in this piece, called ‘Oxygen Flute’, data from 58 live bamboo stalks,
tomato seedlings and sauna-like heat were fed into a computer to allow listeners to feel the
Earth’s greenhouse effect

Because of the chamber’s tight quarters, human breathing rates could also affect the
music, allowing visitors to interact with their breath, influencing the composition and,
hopefully, walking away with an increased consciousness of their participation in the
gas cycles sustaining our planet.

Chafe and Niemeyer accomplished a similar feat in ‘Tomato Music’ (2007-11) with
five vats of ripening tomatoes. For this, Niemeyer enclosed growing tomato plants in
clear vats for 10 days. Each vat was outfitted with a sensor that measured ethylene,
carbon dioxide, light, temperature and air movement. A computer translated these
data into the computer-simulated sound of an ancient Greek hydraulic organ.

The result is a tapestry of echoes, shivers and blips, in a
blanket of knocks and taps that jitter according to the
rhythm of the world

In a third collaboration, ‘�e Black Cloud’ (2008), Niemeyer’s team planted air
sensors in Swiss consulates around the world (both Chafe and Niemeyer are Swiss-
born). �ese cheerful-looking, red 3”x 5” sensors took in readings for light,
temperature, humidity, noise, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds in
locations as far as Kathmandu and Tokyo. Using this stream of data, Chafe composed

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 8/11

an ever-changing landscape of algorithm-driven music: a combination of musical
instruments sampled from around the world including a Chinese oboe, an African
string instrument and a slide guitar. ‘Some dozen sensors were reporting from around
the globe and I sonified their readings in real time. I wanted something pan-global as
part of the sound texture, hence the choice of instruments.’

Artist that he is, Chafe didn’t associate one instrument to one variable. Rather, each
data point could be assigned two or more instruments. ‘It’s like being a painter in a
studio,’ he said. ‘At the beginning, you have a simple notion of what to put on a
canvas, then it starts to develop as the work dictates.’ �e result is a tapestry of
echoes, shivers and blips, amid a blanket of knocks and taps that jitter according to
the rhythm of the world.

Chafe’s composition was revelatory. ‘Do you remember the SARS epidemic?’ Chafe
asked me. ‘�ere was a point at the height of the epidemic that Mexico City had a
quarantine. �ey closed the schools, federal offices, and told everyone to stay home if
they could. We caught a 5 per cent drop in carbon dioxide in Mexico City in that
time.’ �at reactive measure to the epidemic would have been a blip in the world’s
collective radar, buried under thousands of other news headlines – but, sonified, it
was a telling moment when the world slowed down in the face of tragedy.

�e work is part of a burgeoning new musical movement embraced inside CCRMA,
where steel pans, the bamboo angklung, Chinese gongs, and drums are as prevalent
as synthesisers, laptops and EEG machines.

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 9/11

omputers became instruments as early as 1951, when Australia’s first
programmable digital computer produced the first musical tone generated by a
machine. A few years later, the US computer pioneer Max Matthews, an engineer at
Bell Labs, was writing programs for sound generation and introducing a new form of
computer-generated music to the world.

But to composers such as Chafee, it is not just music for music’s sake – it is also a
portal into the hidden recesses of the natural world. ‘Music has always had what I call
the extra-musical – things that aren’t music themselves,’ says Chafe. ‘Like love songs.
We’re making a song, but there is a story outside of music that’s driving it.’

His latest foray into data-driven music isn’t just a fictionalised emotional rollercoaster
ride, but the narrative unfolding of a brain seizure in real-time. Created in
collaboration with the neuroscientist Josef Parvizi of the Stanford School of Medicine,
this composition emerged as a way to convert EEG readings from patients
experiencing brain seizures into actual audio. �e aim is to save the lives of the
comatose, where seizures are often invisible without elaborate brain-wave tests that
must be evaluated by specialists off-site – all translating to irreversible damage
because every minute lost is a minute against the patient.

The song of a brain in seizure is like a disgruntled,
desperate fly in search of a way out of a sealed jar

If they succeed, Chafe and Parvizi are hoping that, instead of embarking on a slow
process, medics will have access to a simple device, placed near the patient’s head,

C

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 10/11

that would convert brain waves into an easy-to-interpret auditory signal. Instead of
waiting hours, trained staff could render a diagnosis in minutes.

�is is possible because the song of a brain in seizure is easy to distinguish: like a
disgruntled, desperate fly in search of a way out of a sealed jar. ‘Seizures are rhythmic
and very loud compared to other states,’ said Chafe, who set this biological music to
the disconcerting sound of the human voice, in the hopes of building greater empathy
in the listener.

Seizing brain: music generated by the desperate sound of the seizing brain can save the lives
of the afflicted by quickly alerting staff to what’s happening

�e music of the seizing brain is so distinct, in fact, that as many as 90 per cent of
trained interpreters are able to pick it out. Chafe and Parvizi are now going through
the rigorous research process that would pass US Food and Drug Administration
standards in the hope of introducing a commercial medical device.

Whether artistic or scientific, sonifying our world has a way of wrenching our guts,
producing visceral reactions that are frequently missing from the merely visual. A
painting we can easily walk away from, but a song – pleasant or not – is inescapable.
‘Carl Sagan had a real nice insight about this,’ Chafe told me. ‘�e effect of using your
ears is the easiest way to achieve, for him, teleportation.’

Aeon Magazine – Chris Chafe The Seizing Brain

3/24/2021 How the sounds of data and nature join to make sweet music | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music 11/11

Carren Jao

aeon.co

Sound is a way to connect with another being. Just think of the last time you sang and
danced with someone else. Suddenly, that lonely existence transformed into a heady
feeling of communality. Musical sound also allows listeners to empathise with data, an
impossible feat were it not for music’s emotive qualities. Suddenly, abstract seizing
brain waves in graphic form elicit natural, jittery responses from listeners. What was
once inscrutable has become graspable.

Our inescapable auditory sense opens us to a larger world. Animated by rhythm,
tempo and timbre, music in all its incarnations wrenches us free from the confines of
our physical selves, connects us to others and re-situates us as part of a bigger, more
mystifying world.

is an art, architecture and design writer, whose work has been published in �e
New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and Discover magazine, among others.
She lives in Los Angeles and Manila.

2 July 2015