Dr. Fiorella Terenzi IN CONVERSATION WITH JAS. MORGAN & BART NAGEL MONDO 2000: How many albums do you have out? DR. FIORELLA TERENZI: Only one. This is my first one: Music From The Galaxy and it’s a new project, it’s galactic music. And it’s the first experiment that you can do transforming radiation coming from celestial objects into sound. M2: What is the method for translating the radiotelescope information into sound? FT: Firstly you need to collect the radiation coming from space like stars and galaxies using huge radiotelescope astronomy facilities. In my case I was using the New Mexico Siccoro(?) a very large area radiotelescope. And we were using the Kit__(?)Nation Observatory and the Ezone (?) European Souther(?) Observatory. And all of these astronomers were working on a galaxy called UGC6697. And they were collecting radiation. Once you collect radiation coming from a celestial object you save the radiation into a tape or you can send it by cable to every kind of computer in the universe. M2: Is it recorded digitally or analog? FT: Digitally. So it was the Center for Experimental Music at the University of California San Diego where I get the data coming from this galaxy. The first thing I did was to display all the numbers on my computer screen. So as soon as you display the numbers what you see on the computer represents the radiation coming from UGC6697 with intensity and frequency. The first things that you realize is that the radiation is coming at a billion of hertz and that you know that the human can hear sound between twenty and twenty thousand hertz. The first thing is to reduce the frequency from a billion hertz into twenty to twenty thousand hertz. Then you have all these numbers that represent the wave form and you send all this information to an oscilloscope which is able to synthesize a sound and everything. If you send information representing a piano or a violin to an oscilloscope the oscilloscope will play a violin. If you send a harp, the oscilloscope will perform the harp. In my case I sent this kind of data. And when I sent the data to the oscilloscope I get to know what kind of sound I could get from the universe. So it takes me almost eight months before I get to hear a little bit of the sound of the universe. For each second of sound that you have on the compact disc it takes about eight or nine hours to work on the computer. It’s very long because the computer has to process the numbers. So after eight months I was ready and I had four hours of sound from the galaxy. And then I pressed execute and the data flowed directly from the computer to the loudspeaker using a digital to analog converter. M2: Why did you choose the particular galaxy? FT: The galaxy is very complex. It’s a strange galaxy; it’s a spiral galaxy. Really powerful. And sometimes you have such a strong emission from this galaxy. It’s easy to understand the reason. It’s really far away. It’s one hundred eighty million light years away from earth. This galaxy has a small satellite companion galaxy that is spinning around. The two galaxies collided together and created the complexity that is reflected into the sound of the galaxy. For that reason I chose UGC6697. Also because the data was available. At the beginning I was thinking of using a pulsar. A pulsar is a star that pulses every second or maybe every millisecond. And a pulsar sends to earth a precise signal in time. So for the next time I want to use a pulsar because I want a cosmic drummer for my composition. But for now there is so much to work with in UGC’s sound. M2: Do you perform this live? FT: Yes. I did a Greenpeace Music Nature Festival with Paul Winter and Montreux(?). And all the income from the concert was given to the park at the Antarctic. I performed the Galaxy using a synthesizer, a sampler and an oscilloscope to show the wave form of the vibrations. I had also part of the Galaxy on a DAT cassette just to use up the ground. And I was playing from the synthesizer the raw data of the galaxy. On the second part I had a musician playing shells, stones. coconuts, flute and all that kind of thing. I associated the galaxy with ancient and primitive musical instruments because it’s one hundred and eighty million years ago we are talking about here. So I said I just want a little bit of the atmosphere of musical primitivism. And then I got to the future: the galaxy performed with harp, bass, saxophone, drummer, congas and piano. And everybody was following a score. M2: So what you were playing was sounds that were sampled from the galaxy and you were playing them back? FT: Yes, playing sounds coming from this galaxy. M2: Do you have that on tape yet? FT: Yes I have a video. M2: Why music and math? How is that possible? FT: To me science_ in mechanistic physics or astronomy or astrophysics_if you do astrophysics to a certain level_to me science gets like art. And in one way art_in this case music_needs science. Music is another form of science. Both science and music need technique. And so they’re really correlated together. I started to look at the sky with my grandmother; going out to the country when I was a baby. When I was seven years old I started to sing in a choir in a church. So I grow up and go to a university in physics and at the same time I’m singing in a choir. I get to the university to study piano and opera and composition. But until two years ago astronomy and music were really separate, not linked together. Then I was taking the course of radio astronomy, and I realized that a radio wave coming from a celestial object was very similar to musical notes. Both have an intensity that gives you loud sound or soft sound. And they have also a frequency that gives you a high or low pitch. So I went to my professor and said, Listen, I have an idea: instead of looking for an image of the universe, instead of looking at photos of stars, I want to try to play the universe. I want to hear the sound of radiation coming from a celestial object. So I went to the Center for Music Experiment using their big Vox(?) work station and I did it. It was just an experiment and I believe the sound is a powerful instrument to investigate the cosmos. Because sound reflects chemical and physical properties of celestial objects. Think about the universe. Many times you have a binary system of stars. And they spin together. And they are a particular star system because their frequency, the frequency of these stars is almost the same, not quite equal but almost. So the two stars generate beats. The same phenomena of beats you have when you tune an instrument. You are tuning your bass to a 440 A, and let’s say your string is tuned at 445 hertz. If you play together you generate beats, and the beats stop when you tune your strings precisely. But you can’t see beats. You can’t see how the two fragments collided using your eyes. The graphic representation doesn’t show you. But if you play the binary system of stars, you’re able to hear beats. So this is a powerful way to investigate the cosmos. A second example: Think about the Doppler Effect. When you hear a car running down the road you hear it_low frequency to high frequency. The sound changes. The same with the earth and the stars. Some stars are going far away, some stars are getting closer. Let’s say a comet is passing through; that’s the Doppler Effect. Another example is hydrogen. It has a special frequency. It is one thousand four hundred and twenty megahertz. Every time you tune your radio telescope to that frequency you have the distribution of the hydrogen in the galaxy. So, using a sound classification of chemical elements, maybe in the future you will be able to recognize, based on the sound of celestial objects, which chemical elements there are in them. That’s a research proposal I’m putting together, but there are many difficulties. Some professors said to me, Yes, let’s do it; others said, Fiorella, it’s impossible to use sound in astronomy. But I believe it is possible to have a sound classification of stars and galaxies. Ten years ago it wasn’t because ten years ago there weren’t computers or computer music software. Astronomers know their work but they don’t know about computers or computer music. M2: What is the possibility of doing live performance with realtime sampling of the cosmos? FT: I would love it. Sometimes I have a dream of a big stage with a satellite dish and this dish moves together with the music of the galaxy. And then they focus over a galaxy or another star or maybe over the hydrogen, so I can make music with the hydrogen. Or maybe just to get the radio telescope pointing to the Voyager, get the signal from the Voyager and convert the signal into sound and make music with that. M2: Is that possible yet? FT: It’s possible and I think it’s just a matter of course. M2: You said this wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago and now it is. Where do you hope the technology will be ten years from now and what will it allow you to do? FT: I hope that the technology gets faster; like I said, for every second of sound the computer had to work eight or nine hours. And I hope that, let’s say, if the astronomical facility on the earth can send me the signal, I would like in realtime to transform it right away into sound the observation data they are receiving from the universe. It’s a matter of handling billions of numbers in a millisecond. M2: I was also thinking of increased fidelity and flexibility in the radiotelescope. Isn’t there a project in the planning stages now that they would have radiotelescopes positioned in triangular position about the world. I think there’s one in Africa, one here_and essentially they’ll turn a large portion of the surface of the planet into one big dish. Would you work with a system like this? FT: It’s called inter-telometry where all the radiotelescopes are localized in different parts of the world. And when you correlate the signal of each radiotelescopic light you have huge dishes combined together observing the sky. The only problem is when you point the radioscope at the sky you have to focus very well in a small portion of the sky. With a telescope you cover a huge space. So then they are complementary. If you want to take a picture in radio you have to work very hard, because the radioscope covers a very small section of the sky. M2: I noticed when I listened to your album that a lot of the sound that it generated actually sound like some of the space soundtracks that I’ve heard in the past. Did you notice that similarity at all? FT: Of course. Another thing I noticed like that is when you’re tuning your FM radio you get a wahwah sound. You know why, because you’re working with electromagnetic waves, you are shifting between_so it is very similar to the sound of the galaxy. In a way the radio station is human-made_like the galaxies they are electromagnetic generated. Also the first synthesizer, like Moog synthesizer, they were able to use a frequency modulation with that wahwah sound with potentiometers. So you can modify your signal. But I think it’s the inspirational nature of electromagnetic signal, this kind of noise, the noise of the electricity and the wire, the noise over the phone communication. Sometimes when you call overseas you can catch a little bit of the ground noise it generates by the atmosphere of the earth. This is a strong signal. The first star in radio astronomy was known in 1933. The man who was working on it was Carl Iowsky(?) And he was working for Bell Laboratory on communication from one ocean to another. And every time he worked there was this big background noise like a hiss. And he was wondering why. So he decided to point the antennae to look for where it was coming from. And soon he realized that there was like a ghost radio station moving all around the horizon in synchronization with spring, summer, with the year. So he realized that no one could do that kind of registration, moving in circles all around the horizon. So he realized that the signal was coming from the nucleus of our Milky Way. Our galaxy is a strong radio emitter. And he was the first one to catch a little bit of this background noise. Unfortunately radio astronomy moved into another direction. Radio waves became an image, became a graph. I am trying to use sound to explore this possibility. M2: In Hinduism the idea of the word Om is supposed to be the most accurate wave that the sound that a human makes could approximate this sound_this cosmic roar. How do you think they intuited that all those years ago? FT: Human imagination can go really far away. I believe in a harmony, and if you can tune into that harmony, you are able to go where ever you want. And harmony also means resonance. And how with my body I can tune into that resonance and use my inspiration and expiration and use my resonance. I practice yoga and Tai Chi Chuan, so I have a little bit of experience with Om, and you have to use your breath to realize the Om. But the Om is not a sound that you make with the vocal chords. It’s your breathing that resonates in your body. The resonant wave gets translated into far away. Like the tuning fork_when you strike an A all the instruments start to resonate. The same with our vibration when it gets in contact with the cosmic and universal vibration. M2: With the synthesizers do you use even-tempered tuning or do you experiment with just tuning? FT: With my synthesizer I’m only controlling the galaxy. Also what I’m doing is breaking the galaxy into small fragments just to perform a melody or harmony using the galaxy. Or if I use the library of sound from my synthesizer I pay a lot of attention to the timbre quality. Because if it’s too much electronics it doesn’t fit well with the galaxy. Because the galaxy itself, the raw data is a strong digital signal. You can recognize a strong electromagnetic signal. So I don’t want to overload the composition. For that reason I’m trying to use harp, saxophone, piano, maybe in the future, voice. M2: But with the even tuning, A440, you’re getting esthetically pleasing but definitely it has a certain amount of beats that exist because of the all around modification of the tuning. You’re using say an open D tuning all the way across, you wouldn’t have those beats in between notes. Now, do these man-made, intentionalized beats that exist between keys introduce any damage to the performance? FT: That’s a good point. You mean if there are too many beats generating together_a collision between them_ M2: It was a man-made invention to make a keyboard that you could play in any key on, but before that we used to have a different piano to play in any different key. It was a little more accurate, a little unwieldy, but a more accurate tuning system. That’s why I was wondering; because it’s possible in synthesizers now. FT: I think you hit a major point, because the tonal system of solfege is a little too small to experiment over the galaxy. And for this reason I would like to put between the musical notes A and B five or seven steps more to have more microtonizing. M2: This indicates the Eastern tuning system, the existence of quarter tones. Does the galaxy sing in quarter tones? FT: It does. And sometimes when I compose I’ll go to the piano and I’ll try to look for some tonality like a B flat. Then I’ll look for some musical notes and write them down on a score. Then I have to combine together these musical notes following harmony and melody, and that’s my tonal composition over the galaxy. I would love to know more about Eastern, Arabic, Chinese_they are more fine tuning systems that fit very well with the galaxy. I would probably need the expertise of someone else. M2: How about Kepler’s work_are you familiar with that and did it influence you? He had the music of the planets_ FT: I found out about Kepler and Pythagorus after my degree. It happened during an interview in Italy. He said, Are you familiar with Kepler? And I said, Yes, the law of Kepler, and he said, No, the music of the spheres, and I said, No. So I went to the library and discovered that Kepler had the intuition that planets moving around the stars emit a note like a musical note, and that the intonation is related to the distance of the planet from the sun. And so our solar system can perform a scale. And based on that he invented a wonderful theory. And there was also Pythagorus who was the the first one who built a musical instrument. He believed that numbers are perfect and for that reason only numbers can reflect the cosmic and universal harmony. And Socrates was saying that the movement of celestial bodies generates notes, music. But man doesn’t hear that music anymore. Because man is born with the music of the stars in the hearing. So we grew up with this kind of music and so we are unable to hear this kind of music because we grew up with a sound in our mind, and we are unable to recognize anymore that sound. M2: So when the universe sings, what is it singing about? FT: It’s singing harmony; it’s singing Please listen to me. When a star explodes, for you it is a silent process. When something explodes on the earth you are able to hear the explosion. If a star like our sun explodes in the universe do you think there is no sound associated with that phenomena? M2: I think if our sun exploded I’d hear it. FT: Each time that something explodes the explosion generates sound. Because sound is generated by a wave of compression and decompression. If you are able to see how air vibrates you will be able to see the atoms of the air getting compressed and decompressed. This kind of wave is typical of an explosion. So when a star explodes it’s a huge sound. The sound is not heard because the sound is not propagated into space. But that kind of wave gets transformed into an electromagnetic signal that we are able to receive. Think about how the Big Bang would be. M2: I think it would make for a good concert for you. Are there other types of celestial phenomenon that you are interested in recording? Black Holes? FT: Pulsars, because I need a cosmic drummer for my compositions. A black hole absorbs everything_the light_so from a black hole we don’t have anything back, no radiation, because everything is absorbed back into the hole. Light, which usually goes straight, as soon as it gets closer to the gravitational field of the black hole, curves and spirals into the black hole. So pulsars, stars, galaxies_I would like to do a catalog of sound_a classification of stars and galaxies where you can go and hear Saturn or Andromeda, and you push a button and you hear it. But also once you get one of the celestial bodies into sound you can use a statistical process to recognize the sound of the chemical elements or the physical, etc. M2: When will you be on MTV? You have a music video, right, so you’re one step away. FT: Yes, I’m on Island Records.