Emergent Music
We are all familiar with the following question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
However, have you ever asked yourself:
If music is made into a forest or deep into the sea, but there is no human around to hear it, is it still music?
Our own views and biases can be reflected by some phenomena and give them an entirely new layer of meaning. Pareidolia describes our tendency to observe certain patterns as existing in some stimuli. Take for example the image below: even though it is simply a wall that has undergone some damage, we cleary see a face.
Let’s explore a variety of ways we can hear music in phenomena that are otherwise not inherently musical.
Music in nature
Our eyes are not fast enough to capture the entire range of motion of a bird flapping its wings. But have you ever wondered if your ears are also missing out? Some birdsongs have an inherent musical quality to them, but it turns out if you slow down the sound of a chirping bird we can reveal a myriad of melodic complexities. Can we call this music?
Coming from a very different environment, another animal known to sing is the humpback whale, its song akin to a ballad.
However, if you speed up the song of a humpback whale, you get something surprisingly similar to a birdsong.
As far as we know, birds and whales might just be talking to each other, but upon listening to them communicating our brains interpret it as a kind of melody, not very different from music.
Music in our environment
Another example is the sound that one can hear upon skating on very thin ice.
While less melodic, it is easy to imagine this as the soundtrack of a movie.
Even one of the landmarks of the USA, the Golden Gate Bridge exhibits a similar phenomena.
What do all of these have in common? When listening to them we interpret the sounds in a new way, hearing a kind of music, often describing the emerging phenomena as being ‘sung’ or being ‘a song’.
Music from ourselves
A different source of emerging music is our own speech. Also called an auditory illusion, Diana Deutsch has discovered in 1995 that by simply looping certain sentences or fragments of sentences, after hearing them several times our brain starts to interpret them as being part of a song.
A project we have released at Qosmo takes a similar approach. However, instead of us interpeting sounds existing in nature, we use artificial intelligence techniques to create an algorithm that can recognize and interpret human sounds creating music out of them, in this case a beat.
Going beyond what we can directly perceive, in another article within our Qosmo Lab, Robin describes a system he built that uses an antenna (SDR dongle) to scan a wide range of radio frequencies and interpret that data, extracting not only musical information but also a visual representation.
Intervention and Orchestration
We can notice how there is an increasing amount of human influence through the examples seen above. While the bridge just makes the sound influenced by the wind, we need a skater on the ice. While we can hear birds chirping without intervening, we cannot hear their intricate complexities without slowing them down. The discovery of the speech to song illusion would be almost impossible without the use of technology. The projects created by Qosmo are applying higher degrees of technological manipulation and take the role of an orchestrator, arranging existing sounds into a musical journey.
It is fascinating to be able to experience all these different unexpected sources of music. At the end of the day our interpretation is more important than the underlying, pre-existing signal. With the help of technology we can enhance our perceptions and are able to take our experiences into new directions. There is music everywhere around us, we just need to pay attention.
Thank you for reading till the end. We are Qosmo, Inc. a collective of Artists, Designers, Engineers and Researchers. Read other Medium articles from Qosmo Lab and if you are so intrigued to find out more, get in touch with us from here. We are actively searching for new members, collaborators and clients who are passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI and creativity. Ciao!
