Miltonline
A discussion on sonification and the intersection of science and music on the Unexpected Elements science programme, broadcast July 6 2023 on BBC World Service and BBC Sounds.
Available here as well as on all other platforms. (The Coolest Science section starts at around 29:25 minutes).
“Hidden music” is a talk given in the interdisciplinary seminar series on Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing on 24.05.2022 at Linacre College, Oxford University. The talk is in two conceptual halves: The nature of music and the music of nature. For info and to watch the talk click below.
GSMD article
The project was led by former Doctoral Programme Leader, Dr Alex Mermikides, who was inspired by the nurses she met when her brother Milton was treated for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – a serious type of blood cancer. Taking Care addresses two challenges facing nurse educators: teaching the sensitive and effective communication of ‘care’ and preparing students for the demanding emotional labour required by their profession. The huge physical and emotional toll nursing can take on staff has been bought into sharp focus over the past two years, but the nursing curriculum hasn’t traditionally taught trainees how to ‘care’ for patients without compromising their own emotional wellbeing.
Mermikides’ ensemble created an interactive drama, Careful, following a collaborative research process with performers and trainee nurses. The process of devising Careful revealed that ‘care’ can be understood as a skilled practice rather than an inherent virtue. The feedback from students on the workshops and performances has been overwhelmingly positive and has led to the materials being rolled out to other nursing schools across the country. As student nurse Michal Kaim reflected in The Guardian, ‘elevating nursing to the level of art gave me another reason to be proud of the choice I have made to become one’. The full performance of Careful can be viewed online.
Keynote Lecture for the World Sleep Congress in Rome, Italy March 2022, examining the use of sonification to communicate and reveal the inner experience of sleep.
A collaboration with Enzo de Sena (Senior Lecturer on the Tonmeister programme, University of Surrey), Deborah Dunn-Walters, Sarah Bailey and Nils Marggraf – sonifying kinship DNA and recognising familial relationships as shared motivic content. A documentary produced in collaboration with University of Surrey was aired on Italy’s Rai 3 flagship science programme Quinta Dimensione (viewership ≈886,000). Segment below.
May 24th 2022 2pm, a lecture for staff, students and public Oxford University’s wonderful new Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing. Directed by Prof Morten Kringelbach “The Centre undertakes interdisciplinary research into Human Flourishing, Eudaimonia and the Life Well-Lived with a special focus on human brain dynamics through its link with the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University, Denmark.”
The talk Hidden Music: Sonic translations of Nature will explore music as a tool for listening, and understanding patterns of the natural world, blurring the boundaries between people and the ‘outside world’, and ‘art’ and science. It will take place in the Pink Seminar Room in Linacre College and streamed online. Details here.
Colours of the Ukraine Flag making their own music.
The Sound Asleep project was presented with Professor Debra Skene in the World Sleep Congress on March 11 2022, Rome, Italy,
World Sleep 2022 is a global scientific congress bringing the best of sleep medicine and research to Rome, Italy, March 11–16, 2022. The World Sleep congress, now in its 16th iteration, consistently gathers the best minds in sleep medicine and research for multiple days of scientific sessions and networking.
Sound Asleep has now been presented at British Sleep Society, European Sleep Research Conference and World Sleep Congress engaging with hundreds of members of the International Sleep Community.
Hidden Music featured in the wonderful New Scientist Podcast
CLP was featured in the Metro newspaper tech section on Friday 13th November 2020. More on the project:
A collaboration with Dr Enzo De Sena, the mutations of the Covid-19 virus over 500 generations are sonified. Every motif is formed by the mutation of successive Covid-19 strains. Although ‘musical’ decisions are made, they are done so not to cloak the data with familiar emotional signs, but to reveal the hidden music of the mutations – as such motivic similarity and variation are the shared language of music and biology. Despite the remarkable amount of change it should be appreciated that Covid-19 is in fact relatively stable, so the hope for an effective vaccine remains.
– Milton
This project tries to sonify the genetic mutations of COVID-19 as they are observed over time. The main aim of the project is to satisfy a personal curiosity and for artistic purposes. However, it is hoped that sonifying the mutations could highlight patterns that would not be picked up otherwise.
The current sonification methodology associates notes’ timing to the position of the mutation within the DNA and pitch to the type of nucleotide mutation (e.g. G->A, or C->T etc). This means that the position of the mutation results in different rhythmic placement, and the type of nucleotide mutation results in different melodies.
– Enzo
To follow the project visit: miltonline.com/covid-sonify
The Careful project has expanded and developed to now support student nurses during the pandemic. The project has been disseminated by The Stage and Medical News Sites.
“A set of drama-based resources to help Kingston University, London nursing students working during the Covid-19 pandemic have been put together through a collaboration with world-leading performing arts school Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London.”
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200621/Drama-based-resources-help-Kingston-University-nursing-students-to-cope-with-coronavirus-pandemic.aspx
https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/coronavirus-guildhall-creates-online-drama-resources-for-nursing-students
A pleasure to take part in this BBC Scotland documentary on sleep, presented by Ian Hamilton and produced by Laura Kingwell. Ian, who is blind has a particualr interest in sleep disorders and the work of Prof Debra Skene, a key collaborator in Sound Asleep. First broadcast 29/3/20 on Good Morning Scotland on BBC Radio Scotland.
Lecture and Workshop for Ableton at Glasgow’s Question Session in the beautiful Lighthouse venue. Make music from anything.
Feb 8 2020 Free Entry – For all Info: https://www.questionsession.co.uk
For centuries. composers have been reaching out beyond the musical world into nature, science and other disciplines for inspiration. Pythagoras conceived of a harmony created by the orbiting planets (The Music of the Spheres), Newton attached 7 colours of the rainbow to the notes of a scale, composers like J.S. Bach encoded their names into musical motifs, and Villa Lobos wrote melodies tracing the New York skyline. This workshop enables musicians of all styles to tap into this vast and profound craft of ‘data-music’. This long-established but niche craft has now been given a profound renaissance with contemporary technology: Ableton Live with bespoke Max for Live devices (available to participants in the workshop and distributed online) allow a world of real-time music creativity beyond the limits of human imagination. We will demonstrate such techniques as the automatic translation of your name into melodies, works of art into rhythms, spider webs into virtual harps, live weather reports into MIDI controls and countless other possible translations. This approach provides a uniqueness and profound meaning to your music-making whatever your stylistic interest, allowing you to tap into the infinite and uncharted universe of musical creativity.
I’ll be keynote speaker-erm-ing at the Royal Asociety of Medicine on Tuesday 4th September at the Royal Society of Medicine, London.
More details here and at the link above:
Join us as we explore the links between sleep, sleep disorders and all forms of art, literature, and music including modern digital media.
We will look at the effect of music in the sleeping brain, the portrayal of sleep and sleep disorders within works of art, the perils and pleasures of sleep apps and their effect on the public perception of sleep and the literature of dreams.
You will learn to:
Sound Asleep was filmed by Jake Davison, Kate Wallace, Josephine Hannon and Megan Brown. They interviewed Professor Morten Kringelbach, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, and Professor Milton Mermikides, a composer guitarist and music theorist.
Jake explains: “The film is about the discovery of newly described changes in brain activity during sleep by Professor Kringelbach and his team, and how conversion of these findings to music could provide a useful diagnostic tool and possibly a therapeutic for sleep disorder treatment. We decided to cover this story because, in the age of smartphones, tablets and a 24/7 world, the quality of our sleep is decreasing and its importance is often overlooked. This new model of sleep brain activity developed by Professor Kringelbach and his team, as well as his collaboration with Professor Milton Mermikides to produce musical compositions from this data, will help us understand the mechanism of sleep better and therefore allow us to improve our own sleep. Both the ground-breaking nature of this research and the unorthodox method of utilising music to potentially unlock more discoveries seemed intriguing to us and something that needed to be heard about
A collaboration with Professor Morten Kringelbach, producing music based on his team’s research into the transitional networks involved during sleep is featured on BBC Radio 4’s weekly science podcase Inside Science and broadcast 28/3/19 at 16:30 and 21:00. Catch up here to listen And here for the wonderful research paper “Discovery of key whole-brain transitions and dynamics during human wakefulness and non-REM sleep” (Nature Comms)
How fast was the petition to revoke Article 50 signed in the 24 hours surrounding Theresa May’s speech on March 20th 2019?
Well if a note was played on the piano every time the petition was signed it would sound (and look) like this.
Ingredients:
Ableton Live 10 + Max/MSP + Excel + UAD Apollo + Adam Audio S2V + NI S88 Keyboard with Light Guide + NI Komplete + Lava Lamp
23 February 2019, The Sound Asleep project was presented by Prof Debra Skene at the Designing Time even at the Design Museum, London:
A day of talks and live performances exploring the design of alternative time systems, based on daily bodily rhythms (known as circadian rhythm).
Currently, ‘clock time’ structures and directs human behaviour. But are there alternative time systems that are better for our health, happiness and overall productivity? Rather than being guided by the clock, the installation investigates new time systems and ways of living.
A series of participatory events and activities over the course of the weekend will test and challenge the structures and rhythms of contemporary life. On Saturday evening there will be a public talk by scientists, artists and designers on the design of time and the nature of temporality.
Book for the free December 5th 2018 6pm event at the Barbican here:
Hear what the neuroscience of falling asleep sounds like! Join composer and guitarist Milton Mermikides and Oxford Professor Morten Kringelbach – an expert in the neuroscience of pleasure – as they explore the musical qualities of sleep. This exciting dialogue will cover the science of sleep and its parallels with musical composition.
Kringelbach will discuss the neuroscience of music and why it is one of the strongest and most universal sources of human pleasure. Mermikides believes everything we do is music, and that music exists from the galaxies down to subatomic particles.
Together they will look at the neuroscience of human sleep and how harmonic patterns in our sleep cycle can be used to create musical compositions reflecting sleep during both health and disease. You will hear both what good and disrupted sleep patterns sound like. You’ll also find out how our body clock differs from the 24-hour clock and how this impacts our natural sleep cycle.
Kringelbach will present his new research identifying the neural pathways for how we fall asleep. Building on this, Mermikides will present new music he has composed based on Kringelbach’s discoveries. For the first time, you will hear what the neuroscience of falling asleep sounds like.
Sound Asleep is a public lecture open to everyone. It’s part of The Physiological Society’s Sleep and Circadian Rhythms meeting taking place at the Barbican between 5-6 December 2018.
My deep interest in the fields of (micro/macro) rhythm and data music, came together in the BBC Radio 4 ‘The Rhythm of Life’ 2-episode series presented by Evelyn Glennie. A great pleasure to chat rhythm and music translations with her, among fabulous Bridget Riley prints at the Tate Britain. I appear briefly at the end of Episode 1, but with more to say in Episode 2 The World as an Orchestra.
Listen live on Tuesday 28th 2018 and September 1st 2018 11.30am, or catch up after the first airing here
Here’s some background
Virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie reveals a hidden world of rhythm around us and searches for musical inspiration from some unlikely sources.
As a musician and rhythm obsessive, Evelyn has always beenfascinated by the rhythmic nature of the world around us. She explains that, by learning to focus our attention, we can tap into a complex realm of energy and pattern in our surroundings. Over the course of the programme, Evelyn tunes into everything from the oscillation of a tree in the wind to the polyrhythmic groove of our solar system.
Visiting the Mini plant in Oxford, an enormous factory that beats out a steady meter of 1000 cars a day, Evelyn surveys the endless rows of robotic arms and describes the location as “like being in a massive percussion instrument”. Walking around the factory, Evelyn is desperate to “play the space”. Back in her studio, surrounded by percussion instruments, she does exactly that – hammering out a metallic improvisation inspired by the rhythms of the production line.
Evelyn explains that she has always drawn inspiration from non-musical art forms. At Tate Britain, surrounded by prints by Bridget Riley, Evelyn meets the composer Milton Mermikides who uses digital technology to translate Riley’s famously rhythmic paintings into mesmeric music. Evelyn also performs a percussive piece in response to the looping rhythms of Riley’s work.
Finally, Evelyn gazes up at the buildings that line the Thames with composer Peter Adjaye, whose work is heavily influenced by the rhythm of architecture. Evelyn explains that, like a piece of music, a building is a composition based on structure, ornamentation, repetitive patterns and layer upon layer of rhythm.
Presenter: Evelyn Glennie
Producer: Max O’Brien
A TBI production for BBC Radio 4.
A max/msp/Ableton Live tool I’m building to aid my hidden music projects. So many possibilities, these are literally first-go unpolished demos. Images by Bridget Riley.
…I wish.
Delighted to be giving the final public lecture for the Physiological Society’s snappily titled Sleep and Circadian Rhythms from Mechanisms to Function event as part of their 2018 Year of Sleep initiative. December 6 2018 Barbican, London. More details to follow.
https://www.physoc.org/sleep_circadian/sleep-and-circadian-rhythms-mechanisms-function
Bridget and Milton Mermikides will be performing their classical guitar and live electronic project, Tension Blue at Canterbury Christ Church University, preceded by a talk on Milton’s Hidden Music series. Wednesday 24th January 2018, St Gregory’s Centre for Music (Talk 11.45am, Concert 1.10-2pm), Free Entry.
Am looking forward to this event and the opportunity to do something different and fun with the excellent Ensemble Montage.
What does the skyline of New York sound like? How can you make a composition from your sleep patterns or blood cells? Music can be made from anything we find around us, from our names or birth dates to our cells, from atoms to stars. Composer and guitarist Milton Mermikides presents the fascinating origins and history of data sonification – the translation of information or patterns into sound and music – as well as a selection of his own compositions derived from sleep cycles, viruses, paintings, exoplanetary moons, traffic patterns and other ‘non-musical’ data. In addition, a string trio of the Ensemble Montage will demonstrate how these data sound and perform a new composition based on ‘the hidden music’ of Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival. Discover how music can reveal the patterns in the natural world, and give us both a theoretical and aesthetic appreciation of everything around us.
For students and subscribers of Studium Generale tickets are € 5,-
