Ocean ARTic Journal 27/V/21 - Michael Begg Studio

Mail from Finlo Cottier at the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland this morning. He sends lots of images illustrating data for various rhythmical cycles relevant to the territory. Tidal fluctuations and the layers of polar and oceanic water, the ‘spring bloom’ of May and the preceding, rising ‘crecendo’ of nutrients in the water. Curious, actually, to see how random the presence of sea ice is in comparison to the other elements under observation.

The "crescendo" of nutrients growing through the winter months, that suddenly collapse in May during the "Spring bloom" of biological material

The impression I have, increasingly over time, is to view these illustrations as scores. When Finlo presents illustrations together - one showing ocean temperature, the next showing biological activity, then salinity - the interplay of salinity, biological activity and temperature - the sense is of an ensemble piece in which the colours and spikes only require to be rendered as notation.

Data from an ocean glider moving south to north in the Barents Sea north of Norway. Figure (a) is temperature showing warmer waters in the surface and colder waters to the north (right hand side). At the same time in figure (b) the surface is fresher and the biological activity is concentrated in the surface Figure (c).

Most intriguing of all is my suddenly noticing that on the graphs, pressure is recorded in decibels. A call with Lukrecia confirms that in this context it can be read as an oceanic alternative to depth reading. Still worth keeping in mind as I increasingly feel that with so many streams of data running in parallel it is going to be difficult to see through the overall texture to hear particular points of interest in the stream. Having a mechanism within the data itself whereby the amplitude can be attenuated on individual tracks would be useful.

Lukrecia confirms that the Arctic data is still being downloaded from AWI servers. The archive of the project has been backed up onto tape and, unfortunately, although we only require a small subset of the overall data the full project requires to be downloaded so that the relevant information can be extracted. I feel sorry for her having to go through what must be a mind numbingly frustrating process to get back at the data that we need. Hopefully, after the weekend, we’ll have some Arctic data in place and I can begin swapping out the Antarctic data for the streams we’re going to be working with.

Then we can, all being well, become playful with our toys.

I’ve suggested that we take some time on the Sunday to screen share our main software tools. Lukrecia can share with me how she queries and arranges data. I want to show her how the data sits in the context of a Max patch and how the data points are called, analysed and turned into representative sound. Whilst it can be complicated and frustrating to get the thing to work properly, it should be simple enough to explain the broad strokes in the process - enough to enable AWI to see whats going on and engage in the process of establishing voices, frequency ranges, filter parameters and so on. Critically, I want to as soon as possible develop another proof of concept model that uses sampled instruments and diatonic scale and harmonic structures as an alternative to the oscillators.