Music out of chaos

Victor Ryckaert: What effect can your work have on music? On science?
Insook Choi: By working on the design of sound structures which reflect the behavior of systems or the structure of data, we have to consider criteria which might have not been considered otherwise; the criteria which feed our goal, 'How to design sounds for conveying information which is significant to the system behavior that we want to observe.'

This concept of sounds is neither sound effect nor 'music,' but applied to the delivery of information through the mode of qualitative observation. On music this kind of approach will make an inquiry to broaden well-comforted aesthetics and urge the community to be educated by alternative aesthetics.

On science, the community will benefit from playful observatory platforms. The graphic has been useful as a platform, with sounds it will add more to the irreducibility of our understanding of what we observe.

VR: Does it bridge any gaps between these disciplines? In what way?
IC: Was there a gap between these disciplines? The production of sounds is directly related to the physical properties of instruments and how we interplay with those instruments with an understanding of physical laws.

When we listen to Bach's Aria on G, we listen to sound waves from a resonating body traveling through air to our eardrum and activating our neurons to process the information.

This fundamental connection has been overlooked by researchers from both ends; it is the research trends which create these gaps. So I would say there are continuous paths and mutual feedback loops between these disciplines, science and music. In my work I make this relationship more explicit through digital technology by designing sound synthesis tools and simulations.

VR: What motivated you to compose music from chaos?
IC: Complex dynamical systems, such as 'chaotic systems,' have many interesting properties. From simple patterns to complex patterns, many degrees of intermittencies, characteristic transient behaviors, noise-like chaotic signals, and all these various degrees of complexity can be articulated in many levels of sounds and musical structures. It is challenging from composer's point of view not only to compose a musical piece also to build sound synthesis systems to compose with. And that sound synthesis system has to have requisite varieties to host the chaotic system and yet be perceptually differentiable. The many problems presented looked interesting enough to undertake as compositional problems.

Back to open your ears to the sounds of chaos


access / Summer 1994 / NCSA