‘Variable 4’ is an outdoor sound installation created by James Bulley and Daniel Jones that translates weather conditions into musical patterns in a real-time score composition. The sound installation first exhibited in the coast of Kent (England), uses a meteorological station (Campbell Scientific’s BWS-200) to capture the changes in the weather in real-time: wind, rainfall, sunlight, humidity, and temperature. The director of this ‘landscape’ orchestra, a software piece created by the artists, collects this information and drives different movements for each weather circumstances. Besides movement recombination, the weather parameters also define every aspect of the piece, from broad harmonic progressions down to individual notes and timbres. Over twenty-four hours, the visitor can experience this weather-driven musical composition spatialized across eight speakers placed along with the same environment that has created the piece.
I am very interested in developing interfaces and devices able to read analogic properties and intervene with digital materialities in the physical environment. For me, this is an excellent example of a capturing system that amplifies our perception and allows us to perceive what is generally hidden to our senses. The software piece of the artwork acts as a synesthetic mechanism that reconfigures the matter of landscape as an ‘expanded’ opera.
Link to the website: http://www.variable4.org.uk/