DESCRIPTION:
"Cloud Chamber" A Duet for Violin and Subatomic Particles.
Alexis Kirke, Antonino Chiaramonte, Anna Troisi, Eduardo Miranda.
California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco.
Originated by: Alexis Kirke.
Violinist: Alina Polonskaya.
Developed with: Antonino Chiaramonte, Anna Troisi, Eduardo Miranda, John Matthias, Nick Fry, Cathy McCabe.
At the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University, UK.
California Performance Sponsored by: Plymouth University and Stanford University.
Commissioned by: Roland Levinsky Memorial Fund and Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2011.
Chamber manufactured by: Supersaturated Environments.
Video Production by: Patrick Haynes, Adam Behrmann, Chris Whitmore.

UK Premier featured in Wired, New Scientist Online and CultureLab, BBC World Service, The Guardian, Discovery News and Discovery Channel Canada, and O Globo.

This partially-improvised performance researched in various configurations how music might be able to make the quantum world visible, thereby expressing the processes of fundamental particle physics. It premiered at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival (February 2011) and was subsequently performed at Rutherford-Appleton Labs UK, invited by ISIS Neutron and Muon Source (January 2012), and at California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (June 2013), performed at the banquet of the world's main conference on fundamental particle physics ("Lepton-Photon 2013"). Kirke developed the concept, composed the music, and managed the project and software and hardware development. Cloud Chamber explicitly aimed to develop a strategy to involve particles in live interactive musical performances. In previous works inspired by particle physics there has been no real-time interaction between physics processes and other parts of the performance (see, for instance, Brody 1997; Sturm 2001; Coleman 2003; O' Flaherty 2009). Kirke managed the development of an instrument which can be 'played' live by atomic particles. Also in the configurations for the first and third performances, not only did the particles influence and create sound, but the accompanying solo violin directly or indirectly influenced the particles physically. This two-way process utilises cosmic rays entering a glass chamber, saturated with ethanol and cooled by liquid nitrogen, making the particles in the cosmic radiation visible in real time. Visual recognition methods, granular synthesis and electrical field generation - controlled in some performance-configurations by the violin and in others by the composer - enable an interaction between the subatomic particle tracks and the acoustic part of the performance. A paper on the direct-violin influence configuration - delivered at the International Computer Music Conference, and published in its proceedings (2011), and an article in Leonardo (2013) - have disseminated this methodology to computer musicians and interdisciplinary artists respectively.

From New Scientist: "The science doesn't stop there though. Kirke has long been fascinated by baryons - composite particles made for three quarks - and decided to map the different compositions of possible observable baryons into different pitches and rhythms. To this he added neutron scattering data from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford. Then began the hard work of mining this vast swathe of data for phrases to use in his composition."