weather made         cdr available from annette works.


why hang out on an uninhabited scottish island with a bunch of kite flyers, digital artists and writers for a week?

The point of being a composer in the Syzygy project for a week of watching and living in skies and sea and Scottish space, was to get involved with the weather to make music. Not simply listen and roam the island's details to record lush arrays of sonorities to then process through methods I currently exploited. No, not the point at all. (Note to Imogen O'Rourke, Guardian, Saturday 17 July 1999)



Here on Sanda island was an opportunity to access data reflecting the amount and type of light present, temperature, wind speed, and position of the mother kite as it hovered 100m above our heads. Live data mirroring the weather. A system that we had hooked which i attempted to use to replace my own ideas and gestures when composing. In other words, I designed a software instrument for the weather to play and recorded the results.



Initially, radio microphones were set up to sample sounds in the field, on the kites/the kite flyers/ the computers in the field station with the most interesting results being from the kite strings as they vibrated taut holding the kites to earth. These sounds were sampled either when the data being read from the kite flyers brain went beyond a certain point, or from a clock or a random timing. At the same time, those sounds were processed, by pitching, filtering, layering, crunching, breaking up and looping; the amount of and timing being determined by the constantly incoming weather data.

Over the days, different systems were developed and tried with a huge variety of results, the controlling factors constantly changing themselves of course. [Days of too strong winds/bright sun/no clouds/ symphonies of greys/ gusting to force 8/becoming 'becalmed' to name but a few ]. But one of the systems that produced some beautiful music involved taking 30 second samples from the kite string every 35 seconds, the temperature determining the start point of a loop, the wind its length, the position of the kite the sound to move between right and left speaker, and the amount of full spectrum to filter the result through a soft comb filter. Inbetween these sampling points, another 20 second sample was being taken whose loop points were determined by the same factors, but whose filtering was controlled by the amount of uv light. The result was that when the sun burst from behind a cloud, a note would pop out from a resonant filter, its pitch determined by the amount of visible light present. That was a calm day, the music was long and still, non linear, marked by occasional bursts of light . Other grey gusty windy days, - using light on filters, wind on duration and temperature on volume , made fast changing glitchy rhythmic stuff, noisy and intense. Use light on sampling and duration and wind on filters on such days and the results are slow and calm with pops of silence.



It seems that the weather is full of patterns which never repeat or can be predicted. Some kind of ideal collaborator maybe.

cdr available from annette works.