Driprosity

This week, the MUSC257 class is presenting a group installation Driprosody in the Art and Media Lab at the Isabel, open daily 10am-4pm. 

The class is using the historic music programming language CSound to sonify data collected by Queen's glacier researchers, on Axel Heiberg Island in Nunavut. This glacier study has run continuously for seven decades so represents a unique window onto contemporary climate change. 

Our project Driprosody references the composition Dripsody (1955) by the Canadian inventor Hugh Le Caine. Le Caine’s piece was created from a single recording of a drop of water, manipulated in speed and repetition to create a lively 90 second classic of electronic music. For the class installation, each participant was asked to make one very nice recording of a water droplet, and to manipulate that recording using streams of data from Axel Heiberg Island. Experimentation with the data set was very free-form, with no particular goal of revealing new scientific information. Instead, the piece is simply a meditation on the dripping, melting glaciers of the Arctic, with the drips animated by the recorded data.