Listening Into the Lattice

Jorge Boehringer

This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences. Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.

THE CONTEXT OF THE ARCHEOLOGICAL DATA USED

To provide material for beginning experiments to sonify antique glass data, Dr. Bertini selected a dataset from a well-known paper in the field (Ceglia,2017). Bertini’s research at Newcastle and Harvard Universities specifically concerns the chemical composition of ancient glass. In this work, chemical analysis is used to characterise the glass chemical compositions (major, minor, and trace elements) in order to suggest a primary production area for the glass from raw materials. The abundance of certain trace elements (>100ppm) can be used as "marker" of recycling processes in translucent faintly coloured glass samples.

The dataset is organised according to historical and perceptual attributes of the specimens (Site, Chronology, Translucence, Colour, (vessel) Type, and Composition resulting from detailed chemical analysis (LA-ICP-MS).

Each glass specimen studied corresponds to one line in the data set, which is broken down into the molecular components, as well as perceptual attributes (e.g. Translucency, Colour, Type) and details of provenance (e.g. Chronology, Composition).

It is worthwhile noting that as interdisciplinary work, our working process raised critical issues for discussions of archaeological glass data in addition to the broader issues discussed elsewhere in this paper. An ongoing issue in this field is that the nomenclature for certain qualitative categories of data is inconsistent, even within the same dataset. In this case, examples include the parameters for colour, and type of vessel that a sample is believed likely to have been derived from. The result of this is that a further level of abstraction was necessary for me to interpret these in the sound domain. It is notable that longstanding issues in one domain are at times highlighted when fields are brought into interaction or an attempt is made to render the data perceptible to a wider audience.

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An image of antique glass fragments from the National Museum in Scotland. While these do not correspond to the actual glass fragments studied in Ceglia, 2017 or other studies we are using, they give an image of what some of the larger ancient glass fragments found in the UK and in Europe look like.

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Sonification of Dataset line 9: a green, hollow-stemmed specimen oxides CaO, Al2O3, TiO2 and P2O5 are sonified.

An example of the organisation of data in the dataset used to begin the project (Ceglia, 2017).

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