Our Project

“Sounding Microcosmos” looks into the relationship between humans and the environment through technology and music. Biodiversity loss is most often pronounced as a mere result of climate change and major focus is on limiting gas emissions; yet as a major ally in carbon sequestration, degradation of various habitat and corresponding biodiversity loss are one of the reasons hindering resilience and the fight against climate change. Species of fungi and phytoplankton (i.e. cyanobacteria) are among the main microorganisms capable of large amounts of carbon sequestration. Conversely, these organisms have little common sense or governmental attention as species for common good, not even as species under threat. They highly depend on the conservation of soil, ocean, wetlands, animals, and flora in their habitat as well as soundscape and climate. Every organism has a definite range of light, humidity, heat, and noise levels as ideal livable conditions. Beyond such levels, they respond with a stress reaction. Some return after a period of recovery (usually beyond the perception of human-time) or give way to new organisms to flourish.

Sounding Microcosmos is a series of musical explorations co-conducting with various decomposing and recomposing micro-environments. During our biodata collection work, we apply various stressors on the colonies of micro individuals – fungi (i.e Saccharomyces cerevisiae in sourdough), mold and land algae, acetobacter colonies (mother of vinegar), and various living individuals in the glass globe (i.e Schizophyllum commune fungi and various slime mold) , which have come out of “dead” pieces of plant branches, leaves, dried cone, tree shell and so on stuffed together 6 months ago. The changes in the sound work point to the effects of micro level individuals’ responses to the external conditions of temperature and soundscape and consequently the ecosystem.

In our work, the micro-level living organisms serve as a musical interface via a GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) sensor which is usually used to detect changes in human emotional states. With the GSR sensor, we can follow slight variations in electrical resistance in the environment that micro-organisms reside. An Arduino board collects the data from the sensor and transmits it to the computer with Python code. Remote OSC (a Node.js library written by Serkan Sevilgen to enable hassle-free data and code sharing between computer musicians. https://github.com/serkansevilgen/remote-osc) handles the sending of the data to the web-based sound installation platform. On the web application, the Csound-based digital instruments wait for the incoming data to perform sonification in real-time and in the browser without any audio streaming between the data source and audience. The audience goes to the URL of the web application and they will not need to install any software or make any changes to their computer/browser settings. The web app will also include the documentation of the project with images, video, and text.

Learning from the micro habitations, we intend to develop our work into a public design that can collect real-time biodata to be used for both scientific research in conservation biology and performative public experience design. Currently we use synthetic sounds as well as both of our soundscape recordings of urban and natural life.