Spiral, supercluster, filament, wall(after Michael Anderson)

for piano and electronics (2023)

Performance by Eric Huebner, piano at the Gassmann Electronic Music Series, UC Irvine, April 19, 2023

Spiral, supercluster, filament, wall (after Michael Anderson)

For piano and electronics

Spiral, supercluster, filament, wall (after Michael Anderson) is the second work in an envisioned series of pieces inspired by the contributions of African-American pilots and scientists who gave their lives to space research. The music grows from my engagement with the sound and science of flight and space. This piece recognizes astronaut Michael P. Anderson, who acted as payload commander and lieutenant colonel in charge of experiments on the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia. Anderson was a distinguished Air Force pilot before NASA selected him for astronaut training and had traveled to space on the STS-89 Endeavour mission. After conducting experiments in space during the Columbia mission, Anderson perished with his colleagues when the shuttle was destroyed during re-entry to Earth on February 1, 2003. My piece connects Anderson’s passionate commitment to space research with cutting edge data from our latest views into the architecture of the universe.

Anderson articulated the dangers of his space missions. “When you launch in a rocket, you’re not really flying that rocket. You’re just sort of hanging on……you’re taking an explosion and trying to control it. The benefits that we gain from exploring space are well worth the risk. I don’t like launches but it’s worth the effort.” During his final mission, Anderson gave an interview from space with PBS’ Tavis Smiley, talking about how space research might help the African-American community and humanity at large. In my piece, I analyzed the frequencies of Anderson speaking to Smiley from space, in words such as: “Columbia; hear you; loud and clear; good; question; I; see; future; bright/ research; beneficial; African-American; community; hopefully; research; up here; help out.”  From these audio analyses of particular words, I selected frequencies to construct significant chordal sonorities in the piano writing, roughly one chord per word, that recur throughout the piece. For me, these emphatic chords reflect Anderson’s altruistic commitment to space research.

Throughout the piece, synthesized electronic resonance sounds accompany these piano sonorities. I connected with Caltech Physics Professor Christopher Martin to create these sounds, drawn from data that Martin generously provided from his research capturing the first direct observations of the Cosmic Web. The Cosmic web, also known as the intergalactic medium, is comprised of hot gasses between clustered galaxies. This vast intergalactic medium delineates the architecture of the universe. The emissions from these distant structures are so faint that it required him to envision and build a sophisticated instrument called the Keck Cosmic Web Imager to detect them.

For my piece, Martin supplied measurements from the intergalactic medium at six different locations deep in space, and undertook a painstaking process to derive frequencies from these measurements. A pianist as well as a scientist, Martin could imagine how these measurements might be heard as music. I used these frequencies to synthesize resonances for the chordal sonorities in the piece. By combining piano chord sonorities derived from Anderson’s speech with synthesized resonance frequencies from Martin’s research, I like to think that the music connects Anderson’s humanistic vision of space research directly with the largest structures of the universe. The shapes of individual galaxies (spirals) and the largest galaxy structures (filaments comprised of galaxy superclusters and walls), provided inspiration for the more intuitive musical designs that make up the piano writing in other parts of the piece, also interwoven with sounds derived from audio of space shuttle flights.

I’m grateful to Professor Christopher Martin (Caltech), pianist and scientist, for his contributions, and also to Professor Martin Gaskell (UCSC), composer and scientist, for guiding me into ways of connecting astronomical measurements and music. The piece is written for and dedicated to pianist Eric Huebner.

—MS

Cosmic Web Sonifications

Please go to the top of this web page to listen to the full piece, Spiral, supercluster, filament, wall (after Michael Anderson), with performance by pianist Eric Huebner.

Below, you can listen to six brief examples of sonifications of the cosmic web. These sonifications are based on fundamental frequencies derived by Caltech Physics Professor Christopher Martin from direct observations collected across six redshift slices of the intergalactic medium.