Sinfonia del Mundo

Science and Nature. Nature is a magic show where the trick is sometimes revealed. Revelation is in itself an act of magic, and that is the magical nature of science. This piece reveals an aspect of nature that, for most of us, is a secret: As much as layers of transparencies can be superimposed in order to create a natural image, the complex sounds of our environment can be composed by the appropriate combination of simple sounds, like musical notes. This is so because the function of the cochlea, the first stage in the chain of sound processing in the brain, is to decompose sounds into “pure tones”. Sinfonia del Mundo creates, mathematically, this same process: It decomposes complex sounds into combinations of pure tones, then assigning a pure tone to each of many speakerphones. Thus, it recreates the cochlea outside of the head of the spectators, constituting itself into a giant cochlea. Making manifest principles of physics and neuroscience, Sinfonia del Mundo reveals a magical secret, stimulating us to re-think the sonic world.

Music and the Sounds of Nature. Night and day we are exposed to sound, we filter it, we ignore it, we get used to it; and then we go to concerts, we go dancing, and we sit down and listen and talk about music. Music is made out of sounds, it’s the deliberate organization of sounds as much as painting is the deliberate organization of color. If we often stop and appreciate the colors of sunset. Why don’t we stop to appreciate the sonic landscape? Decomposing and recomposing everyday sounds into musical notes, Sinfonia Natural is at once nature and musical creation. It invites us to reimagine our auditory perception, get surprised, get un-used, perceive every sound as music.