Singing in the Wires

Singing in the Wires was a piece originally conceived for my PhD portfolio and remade here in the Web Audio API. It is a sonification of national grid data. Taking the story of La Monte Young being influenced by the electrical humming of the power transformer near his childhood home as a jumping-off point, a drone chord is constructed from the numbers making up the demand figure. Using the numbers to describe a harmonic series (another nod to Young), each digit in the demand figure triggers a harmonic of the 50 Hz fundamental and as demand changes the harmonic makeup of the chord changes too. The base pitch drifts with the grid, which itself fluctuates around 50 Hz to balance demand. The base sound is a bowed-guitar note - a gesture to the bowed sonorities of The Theatre of Eternal Music.