Kronos Quartet, Exploratorium combine eclipse with music
SAN FRANCISCO — On Monday, the Exploratorium will provide live feeds of the Great American Eclipse from Madras, Ore., Casper, Wyo. and the museum campus on Pier 15 in San Francisco.
The live video streams will include telescope feeds, video with commentary by Exploratorium and NASA scientists in English and Spanish, and a real-time eclipse sonification produced by Exploratorium staff sound artist and Bay Area composer Wayne Grim, in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet.
“We’re excited that people all across the world — both those who are in the path of totality and those who are not — will tune in to listen to this composition,” says Exploratorium physicist Paul Doherty.
Grim’s composition, titled “233rd Day,” will begin at 9:15 a.m. and last three hours, ending at 12:15 p.m. Kronos Quartet will join the composition at 10:30 a.m., and will play live for thirty minutes before, during and after the totality occurring over Casper.
Totality is the name given to the period during which the sun is completely occluded by the moon.
“Totality will take about three hours to move across the country, and each point along the path will experience only about two minutes of complete occlusion,” Doherty said. “That means people all across the U.S. will have time to experience the eclipse in person and also listen to Kronos Quartet’s performance as totality occurs in real time in Casper.”
To create the soundscape, Grim will process digital information collected from an array of telescopes and translate that information into an auditory experience.
The Exploratorium will stream feeds of the eclipse over Casper from four different telescopes using two different filters. When the telescope feeds switch, the digital information coming in causes the tonal range of the sound to change as well. To hear the music leap and stabilize with each feed transition allows for a piece of music that is not only responsive, but dynamic and fascinating to hear, Grim said.
“The experience of translating astronomical events into music is profound,” says Grim. “You get a chance to listen to light, to understand the relationship between the sun, the moon, and the earth in a new way.”
Grim also incorporates algorithms based on the movement of the planets visible during the dark sky of totality to create the sonification.
The process of translating visual information from the stars into sound is not new. Using a process called asteroseismology, astronomers measure oscillations in light reaching the earth from celestial bodies and convert that data into sound, producing what has been called “music of the stars” and “star’s song.”
Often that music is a spedup and otherwise modified version of data collected from a single source to produce an audible representation of light.
This is not the first time Grim has produced a composition of a celestial event. He produced compositions for the 2012 Transit of Venus and the 2016 total solar eclipse broadcast by the Exploratorium from Micronesia.
This is the first time Grim will be collaborating with the Kronos Quartet.
“I’m elated to have a chance to collaborate with the stars on this piece — I’ve been a fan of Kronos Quartet since I first heard Black Angels, and I’ve been a fan of the sun for literally as long as I’ve been alive,” he said.
For more than 40 years, the Kronos Quartet — David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello) — has performed thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 50 recordings and commissioning more than 850 works and arrangements for string quartet.
In 2011, Kronos became the only recipients of both the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians.
Grim’s focus is on composing for small ensembles, making field recordings, designing multimedia works, and developing a generative compositional language that explores temporal extremes. He is the curator for Resonance, an Exploratorium music series.