[microsound] Sound dunes: Desert resonance / Sonic harddrive

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

from Nettime. tV

------ Forwarded Message From: Geoff Manaugh <gmanaugh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Geoff Manaugh <gmanaugh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005
19:51:08 -0400 To: nettime-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: <nettime> Sound dunes:
Desert resonance / Sonic harddrive

*Sound dunes: Desert resonance / Sonic harddrive*

"Sand dunes in certain parts of the world are notorious for the noises they
make," the New Scientist <1> reports, "as sand avalanches down their sides.
Some [dunes] emit low powerful booms, others sound like drum rolls or
galloping horses, and some are even tuneful. These dune songs have been
reported to last for up to 15 minutes and can sound as loud as a low-flying
aeroplane."

To test for the causes, properties, and other effects of these sand dune
booms, "Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS <2> and
his colleagues shipped sand from Moroccan singing dunes back to his lab to
investigate." There, Douady's team "found that they could play notes by
pushing the sand by hand, or with a metal handle."

They performed, in other words, the transformation of a sand dune ? and, by
extension, the entire Sahara desert, indeed any desert ? even, by extension,
the rust deserts of Mars ? into a musical instrument.

Music of the spheres, indeed.

"When the sand avalanches, the grains jostle each other at different
frequencies, setting up standing waves in the cascading layer, says Douady.
These waves reinforce one another, making the layer vibrate like the surface
of a loud speaker. 'What's funny is that in these massive dunes, only a thin
layer of 2 or 3 centimetres is needed to set up the resonance,' says Douady.
'Soon all grains begin to vibrate in step.'"

Douady has so perfected his technique of dune resonance that he has now
"successfully predicted the notes emitted by dunes in Morocco, Chile and the
US simply by measuring the size of the grains they contain." The music of
the dunes, in other words, was determined entirely by the size, shape, and
roughness of the sand grains involved, where excessive smoothness dampened
the dunes' sound.

I'm reminded of the coast of Inishowen, a peninsula south of Malin Head in
the north of Ireland, where the rocks endlessly grind across one another in
the backwash of heaving, metallic, grey Atlantic waves. Under this constant
pressure of the oceanic, the rocks carve into themselves and each other,
chipping down over decades into perfectly polished and rounded spheres,
columns, and eggs ? as if ideal, Archimedean solids <3> or the nested orbits
of Kepler could be discovered on the Irish ocean foreshore ? all glittering.
The rocks, I later learned, were actually semi-precious stones, and I had a
kind of weird epiphany, standing there above the hush and clatter of
bejewelled rocks, rubbing and rubbed one to the other in the depopulated
void of a coastal November. It was not a sound easy to forget.

Because the earth itself is already a musical instrument: there is "a deep,
low-frequency rumble that is present in the ground even when there are no
earthquakes happening. Dubbed the 'Earth's hum', the signal had gone
unnoticed in previous studies because it looked like noise in the data." <4>

"Competing with the natural emissions from stars and other celestial
objects, our Earth sings like a canary ? it drones on in a constant hum of a
gazillion notes. If it were several octaves higher, and hence, audible to
the human ear," <5> it could probably get recorded by the unpredictably
omnidirectional antennas of ShortWaveMusic <6> and... you could download the
sound of the earth.

*Free Radio Interterrestrial*.

Which, finally, brings us to Ernst Chladni and his Chladni figures <7>, or:
architectonic structures appearing in sand due to patterns of acoustic
resonance.

Architecture through sound, involving sand. Silicon assuming structure.
Desert harddrive, humming.

The gist of Ernst Chladni's experiments involved spreading a thin layer of
sand across a vibrating plate, changing the frequency at which the plate
vibrated, and then watching the sand as it shivered round, forming regular,
highly geometric patterns. Those patterns depended upon, and were formed in
response to, whatever vibration frequency it was that Chladni chose.

So you've got sand, dune music, terrestrial vibration, some Chladni figures
? one could be excused for wondering whether the earth, apparently a kind of
carbon-ironic bell made of continental plates and oceanic resonators, is
really a vast Chladni plate, vibrating every little mineral, every pebble,
every grain of sand, perhaps every organic molecule, into complex,
three-dimensional, time-persistent patterns for which we have no standard or
even technique of measurement. Or maybe William Blake knew how to do it, or
Pythagoras, or perhaps even Nicola Tesla, but...

The sound dunes continue to boom and shiver. The deserts roar. The
continents hum. <8>

(Geoff Manaugh)

+ + + + + + + + + +

<1> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8014 <2>
http://www.cnrs.fr/index.html <3> For an illustration of the 13 Archimedean
solids see
http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit6/unit6.html, and
scroll down. <4> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6464; see also
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3701944.stm <5>
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/space_symphony_000323.html
[Note: this link offers a contrary, but no less interesting, theory
(published in 2000) about the origins of these planetary soundwaves] <6>
Here I?m referring to the excellent transglobal sonic resource,
ShortWaveMusic, found at http://shortwavemusic.blogspot.com/ <7> For more on
Ernst Chladni, click through his Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni; and for more on Chladni figures
themselves see http://www.phy.davidson.edu/StuHome/jimn/Java/modes.html <8>
An illustrated version of this post appears on BLDGBLOG:
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/sound-dunes.html




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tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com --
McGill Communication + Philosophy
ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot +++


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