From the Chromos EP – released 26 May [MESH]
Stream/Buy ‘Chromos’ https://MaxCooper.lnk.to/Chromos
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Video by Andy Lomas
“This project began with a chat to a scientist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, Mikhail Spivakov. His work is related to my old area of research, and he had the idea that maybe I could use some of their data to create a piece of music. So I travelled up to Cambridge to meet him and the rest of his lab group, and their collaborators, to talk about what they are doing there, and think about how it could translate to a music/visual project. We decided to focus on their research on chromosomal conformation capture, which experimentally detects points of contact between chromosomes (long strings of DNA), and then employs computational models of folding, to predict how the chromosomes are packaged up in a complex tangled bundle of strings. This process of simulated folding to create our best guess of real chromosome structure is a beautiful process, so this beauty became the focus of the project.
Luckily for us, Andy Lomas was interested in getting involved, and being the genius he is, he built an interface from scratch for mapping the raw data into the Unreal gaming engine, which could be used for creating video sequences, as well as a VR experience. Once we had the ideas and video aesthetic is was just a matter of me figuring out how to make the music fit. The raw data wouldn’t map well explicitly to music, given music is of a very particular form, and raw data not suited to this form just yields indiscernible noise. So I set about two techniques for musical representation of the video and ideas, one based on live instrumentation, the other based on generative computational approaches.
Chromos is the first of these two pieces, using live instrumentation, and accompanied with the simplest visual form of the project showing a single chromosomal aggregation process. We wanted to show the data is this unadulterated form, so you can see the real science in action, and the real chromosome structure, along with glowing red appearing to show where genes are most highly activated. It’s a glimpse into the complexity and form of one of the most important molecular structures in all of life. So musically I wanted to try and capture some of this grandeur, along with the complex messiness involved, which still yields a coherent, functional outcome (the living being it codes for and creates!). To try and achieve this I turned to one of my favourite instruments, the sansula, and I played lots of tempo-free melodies, which I layered, to mimic the complexity, and then used to define the underlying chord sequence as the coherent centre and function. I decided to keep it free of percussion and other elements, to focus on the beauty and peace of the visual process. I just added a classic wash of real Roland RE201 spring reverb and some work on the widening and pyscho-acoustic space with some simulated binaural effects.
The second piece in this project is ‘Coils of Living Synthesis'”
– Max Cooper
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