DESCRIPTION:
This video is the premier of the Cold Waves project.

Cold Waves is a live electronic music performance/composition inspired by childhood anxieties and memories of growing-up during the Cold War listening to spooky, coded radio broadcasts on shortwave radio.

At the heart of this performance lies specially developed Max/MSP and Max for Live patches combining recordings of original broadcasts of ‘numbers stations’ with simultaneous sonification and visualisation of the number codes. We explore the possibilities of mapping covert data to musical modes, scales, arpeggiations, rhythmic patterns and tempi, using ensembles of virtual acoustic and electronic instruments; much of the musical arrangement is improvised live, and codes and images projected on to video screens. In an effort to maintain a transient aspect in the composition, the Cold Waves Max/MSP applications drives two modular synthesizer systems with real-time DSP processing.

As far as we know no one, other than the intended recipient of these coded messages, has ever been able to decipher them, until now! Using the process outlined above, we attempt to transcode these secret messages into musical form.

Original recording of numbers station broadcasts courtesy of the Conet Project. (1997 Irdial discs).