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VolcanEESM: Global volcanic sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions database from 1850 to present
No full textThis dataset is associated with the VolcanEESM project led by the project team at the University of Leeds. The project was funded by NCAR/UCAR Atmospheric Chemistry and Modeling Visiting Scientist Program, NCAS, University of Leeds. The global volcanic sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions database is a combination of available information from the wider literature with as many observations of the amount and location of SO2 emitted by each volcanic eruption as possible. The database includes no information about the size, mass, distribution or optical depth of resulting aerosol. As such the database is model agnostic and it is up to each modeling group to make decisions about how to implement the emission file in their prognostic stratospheric aerosol scheme. The dataset is divided into two parts based on the availability of satellite data. For the pre-satellite era, the necessary information about the emissions was gathered from the latest ice core records of sulphate deposition in combination historical accounts available in the wider literature (see references included in the database for specific citation for each record). In the satellite era, volcanic emissions were primarily derived from remotely sensed observations. For the period 1850 CE to 1979 the dataset combined the most recent volcanic sulfate deposition datasets from ice cores with volcanological and, where applicable, petrological estimates of the SO2 mass emitted as well as historical records of large-magnitude volcanic eruptions. In detail, for the majority of eruptions between 1850 CE to 1979 , there are few direct measurement of SO2 emissions or quantitative observations of the plume height and very few measurements of the aerosol optical depth (AOD). Parameters in the database include: Day_of_Emission: The 24 hour period in which the emission is thought to have occurred. (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Eruption: Field that contains the Volcano_Number (Which uniquely identifies each volcano in the Global Volcanism Program Database), Volcano_Name (official name from the Global Volcanism Program Database), Notes_and_References (list of notes about the observed parameters and references used to derive each entry). ( Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Latitude: Latitude of each emission from -90 to +90 (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Longitude: Longitude of each emission degrees East (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) VEI: Volcanic Explosively Index of each emission based on Global Volcanism Program Database (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Total_Emission_of_SO2_Tg: Total emission of SO2 in teragram for the specific database entry (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Maximum_Injection_Height_km: Maximum height of each emission in kilometers above sea level. (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Minimum_Injection_Height_km: Minimum height of each emission in kilometers above sea level. (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Month_of_Emission: The month in which the emission is thought to have occurred. (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.) Year_of_Emission: The Year in which the emission is thought to have occurred. (Ordered by the variable Eruption_Number starting with the first eruption in the database.
Observing the Formation of Ice and Organic Crystals in Active Sites.
No full textHeterogeneous nucleation is vital to a wide range of areas as diverse as ice nucleation on atmospheric aerosols and the fabrication of high-performance thin films. There is excellent evidence that surface topography is a key factor in directing crystallisation in real systems, however the mechanisms by which nanoscale pits and pores promote nucleation remain unclear. This dataset supports a study in which we use natural cleavage defects on Muscovite mica to investigate the activity of topographical features in the nucleation from vapour of ice and various organic crystals. Direct observation of crystallisation within surface pockets using optical microscopy, and also interferometry, both demonstrate that these sharply acute features provide extremely effective nucleation sites, and allows us to determine the mechanism by which this occurs. A confined phase is first seen to form along the apex of the wedge, and then grows out of the pocket opening to generate a bulk crystal after a threshold saturation has been achieved. Ice nucleation proceeds in a comparable manner, although our resolution is insufficient to directly observe a condensate prior to the growth of a bulk crystal. This dataset provides new insight into the mechanism of crystal deposition from vapour on real surfaces, where this will ultimately enable us to use topography to control crystal deposition on surfaces. It is also particularly relevant to our understanding of processes such as cirrus cloud formation, where such topographical features are likely candidates for the “active sites” that make clay particles effective nucleants for ice in the atmosphere
Generative Music: A Form without a Format
No full textThis paper explores the history and context of generative music dissemination in the form of distributable computational systems, rather than merely as rendered fixed-media outputs. Coinciding developments in musical scores and technology are highlighted and framed as the basis on which much contemporary work stands. After contextualising computer-based generative music as a narrative that extends over five decades of academic research and development, it introduces a few selected projects and expounds the heterogeneous nature of generative systems. The problem of technological formats for the music will be discussed and contextualised with current developments that point to diverse future possibilities. The paper discusses the musicology of generative music, arguing that musicologists, critics and reviewers have to engage with the natural score format of generative music, namely the code itself
Music Without Musicians: Pietro Grossi’s Experience in Electronic and Computer Music
No full textPietro Grossi (1917-2002) and the S 2F M, the electronic music studio he created in Florence, are one of the Italian experiences in electronic music listed in Hugh Davies’ International Electronic Music Catalogue. Fascinated by the new opportunities offered by technologies, Grossi, a cellist and composer, left his successful career of thirty years in the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for an uncertain venture in electronic and computer music, and later also in visual art. Grossi’s choice was inspired by a radical project: to make music without musicians, to free the intellectual act of composition from the labour of the musical performance.
Grossi’s interest in electronic music began with a visit to the electronic music studio set up by the Italian public broadcasting corporation (RAI) in Milan. There he created his first composition in electronic music, Progetto 2-3 (1961), based on combinatorics. Enthusiastic about this experience, in 1963 Grossi assembled in his house in Florence some basic equipment for making electronic music. The “Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze” (S 2F M) was born. In 1965 the equipment moved from Grossi’s house to the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, the Florentine music school, where Grossi had been teaching cello for many years, and where he began to teach also a class in electronic music. The equipment became available to the composers and the students of the school interested in experimenting with the opportunities offered by electronics, but also engineers and visual artists curious about electronic music took part in Grossi’s work. Throughout the 1960s the S 2F M produced compositions, either by Grossi or by his co-workers. Many of these compositions circulated under the name of the studio, not of the single composer, because Grossi conceived electronic music as an open-ended enterprise in which the tapes produced by others could be dismembered and pieces borrowed and reassembled to create a new musical experience.
In the second half of the 1960s Grossi began to experiment with computers. In the following decades computer music became the main interest of Grossi and his S 2F M. Establishing collaborations with producers of mainframes based in Italy (Olivetti-General Electric and IBM) and scientific institutions involved in computational research (in particular the Italian University Computing Centre (CNUCE) based in Pisa), Grossi had the opportunity to promote the development of both hardware and software tools for computer music. More appreciated by computer scientists and high-tech entrepreneurs than by musicians, Grossi’s work eventually turned in the 1980s to the production of visual art displays with the personal computer (Homeart).
My talk will analyse Grossi’s career path from electronic to computer music. I will investigate the role that technologies – at first oscillators, filters and synthesizers, and later digital computers – played in this process and the alliances that Grossi established with technicians, scientists and hardware developers to pursue his projects. I will argue that in Grossi’s vision electronic music was the first, but incomplete step, towards the full automation of the musical performance that computers made possible. The talk will also consider Grossi’s connections with national and international experiences in electronic and computer music, and his activities for the dissemination of electronic and computer music in collaboration with the Italian public broadcasting corporation
Keynote 3: Music at any cost - fulfilling our desires for intense sonic experiences in the electric and pre-electric eras
No full textSound, more than any other sensory modality, is a stimulus that many of us are willing to experience at a high personal cost. The gig goers who vie to stand near the deafening loudspeakers at a drone metal concert know this. So do the audiophiles who spend thousands chasing elusive ‘perfect’ sound via their modular synths or top of the range headphones. In this talk, I’ll explore this aspect of sound culture which I call the ‘sonic imperative’. I think the sonic imperative has been somewhat overlooked in current histories of electronic music. I’ll attempt to explain why. I’ll also ask what we can learn if we consider it more closely.
Electronics, digital processing and electroacoustic transducers have given composers, instrument makers and listeners new ways to meet their cravings for intense or sublime sonic experiences. They’ve augmented the possibilities on offer. Yet in many ways, these developments have merely intensified highly sought-after, extreme sonic experiences that were already available in the pre-electric era. For example: in terms of shock and awe, a thrash metal guitar, played at maximum volume, arguably has a strong family resemblance to a Wagnerian fortissimo brass section. The hi-fi can bring this to the listener invisibly, creating a thrill that’s comparable to the mystic abyss of the Festspielhaus.
Whether they’re working with new or old tools, composers generally use them to create music with a certain affect (even if that affect is a sensation of emotional coldness). This can sometimes be lost in histories of electronic innovation - for instance in the UK, when talking about the work of Tristram Cary. Perhaps this is because certain composers are reluctant to discuss their emotional intent. It may also be due to the difficulties of describing affect when working with electronic sounds (which can be unfamiliar). According to his son John, Tristram Cary was ‘very buttoned up’ and unwilling to talk about the emotional heft of his music, preferring to talk about compositional concepts and machines, even though the emotion may be evident to the listener. Sonic imperatives and emotional intentions
don’t readily reveal themselves when we survey the physical relics of our electronic music culture, such as the dead machines in museum collections. What’s more, the technical history of electronic music is tightly bound up with other technical narratives, such as the history of radar and telecommunications. Thus, it’s tempting to present a partial history of electronic music machines, one which talks about engineering developments while neglecting any discussion of sonic desire and affect. If we consider these issues, perhaps it will be easier to see electronic music as a continuation of music culture from the pre-electric era
Why didn’t you tell me this before? (Maybe you didn’t want to hear this side of the story)
No full textWho tells history? Who knows about it or who has the opportunity to do it?
We can find several versions about the electroacoustic music history during the past century, most of them with subtle differences, but it is unusual to find references pointing to no “first-world” countries. In fact, this same conference is happening in one of the “central” countries where the history of the world seems to be written. Why is this happening?
The political and economic instability in most Latin American countries has been deeply affecting the life of its inhabitants for decades. Support for artistic activities has usually been postponed to solve urgent social problems. In spite of that, the electroacoustic music development in the region is really astounding. Mauricio Kagel (Argentina, 1931 - Germany, 2008) composed eight electroacoustic studies in Argentina between 1950 and 1953, according to Hugh Davies’ Catalog. Kagel was among the many composers that were laying the foundations of a rich history of experimentation and creation in the region. Reginaldo Carvalho and Jorge Antunes in Brazil, León Schidlowsky and Juan Amenabar in Chile, Joaquín Orellana in Guatemala and Horacio Vaggione in Argentina are just a few names in the ocean of electroacoustic music creativity that has always been Latin America.
The Cuban composer Juan Blanco registered in 1942 the description of a new musical instrument he named Multiorgan, based on 12 loops using magnetophonic wires. This predated the Mellotron -that changed the way of doing music- by many years but recent documentaries don’t even mention him or his device. Mexican engineer Raúl Pavón developed in 1960 an electronic musical instrument: the Omnifon. It was among the firsts voltage-controlled electronic sound synthesizers built. Fernando von Reichenbach invented in Argentina the Analog Graphic Converter in the 60s. It was used to transform graphic scores -from drawings done on a paper roll- into electronic control signals adapted to work with analog sound equipment. José Vicente Asuar produced in Chile a hybrid analog-digital computer system in the mid 70s exclusively devoted to create music.
If you know about the history of electroacoustic music but didn’t hear about what has been happening in Latin America for the past 60 years or so, it is clear that something around has not been said. Maybe it was lost (in translation?) or for some reason didn’t show up in the official history (story?)
If history is written by winners: are those persons named some of the losers of the electroacoustic music history?
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” is not just a presentation about pioneers and their creations but also a strong regard towards the way the electroacoustic music history has been reported and what is being done to that respect
‘Sound was an end in itself’: Early documentary sound and the prefiguring of musique concrete
No full textShortly before his death in February 1972, John Grierson, the ‘father’ of documentary (and inventor of the term), sardonically remarked that ‘of course the French are always finding phrases and discovering terms for things…when I was in Cannes, invited by Jean Cocteau, to hear this amazing new world of musique concrète, I laughed if I did not sneer because it’s something we’d been all playing with a long time before, maybe twelve years’ (Sussex 1975: 207). The work of the British documentary movement which he oversaw in the 1930s and early 1940s is testament to this with Walter Leigh’s title music for the GPO Film Unit’s 6.30 Collection (1934) orchestrated for an ensemble made up of everyday objects and a trumpet, Benjamin Britten working alongside Alberto Cavalcanti, ‘imagining a kind of musique concrète’ in the scores and sound design for Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936) (Mitchell 1981: 83), and Humphrey Jennings’ ‘symphony of sound, evocatively blending all kinds of music, the natural sounds of the city’ in Listen to Britain (1942) (Aldgate and Richards 1994: 226).
By way of Grierson, the work of the British documentary movement was informed by Russian documentary filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov who as early as 1916 created a ‘laboratory of hearing’ declaring ‘the need to enlarge our ability to organize sound…to transcend the limits of ordinary music. I decided that the concept of sound included all of the audible world’ (Kahn 1999: 140). Technological limitations at the time made his idea all but impossible but he eventually realised them in his first sound film, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Don Basin (1930), of which Charlie Chaplin said that he would never have imagined that ‘these mechanical sounds [the rhythmic sounds of Stalinist industry] could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician’ (Petric 1987: 63). In very similar terms Walter Ruttmann declared in 1929 that ‘everything audible in the world becomes material’ leading to his proto Hörspiel work (made using film stock), Wochenende (1930) ‘a study in sound-montage…In Weekend sound was an end itself’ (Ruttmann 1933). Thus, though billed as an audio documentary, Weekend features sounds that to all extent and purposes are abstracted from any source; they are in effect, objets sonores.
This presentation therefore aims to draw attention to the various threads of early documentary filmmaking that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaffer. It will challenge the notion that musique concrète’s lineage lies mainly in the Futurists’ declarations, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise, to Schaeffer’s codifications. Whilst scholars have detailed some of the works mentioned above and occasional connections made with Schaeffer’s ideas, the purpose here is to outline a more comprehensive survey of the material and to offer an alternative history of the origins of musique concrète and the notion of the sound object, with a view to a later detailed article on the topic
Keynote 5: How can and should we write alternative histories of electronic musics? New thoughts on time, history, and electronic musics
No full textWhat is it to write electronic music history? That is the challenge posed, at base, by this conference. Judging by the titles and abstracts, it has been interpreted differently by those offering papers. Some have understood ‘alternative histories’ in the orthodox terms of bringing to attention and valorizing what have been marginalized or unrecognized composers/inventors, schools or practices; others in the more sociological terms of excavating neglected national traditions (eg Finland, Russia), or key institutions, ideologies, or influential paradigms (eg cybernetics); yet others––informed by materialist or posthumanist stances––of rescuing forgotten machines, technologies, media or practices. Some have focused enticingly on ‘failed’ histories, on the systematic absenting from the standard histories of the innovations stemming from popular music and popular media (radio, film), the obscuring of women’s contributions, or the positive potential contributions of perspectives from, say, Science and Technology Studies. Much of this is welcome. Together it etches out a more adequate kind of historiography: beyond the aesthetic blinkers, the Anglo-Americanism, the gender blindness, the elitism, and the liberal-humanist reductionism of previous histories.
At the same time, noticeable is a certain shying away from the need to address what kinds of history––what conceptualization of historical process and historical explanation––might reinvigorate the future historiography of electronic music. In this paper I attempt to set out new thinking on these issues: how might we conceptualize anew time and temporalities in relation to the analysis of electronic music-historical processes? How can we learn from the new materialisms and complexity theorists and write less teleological and less subject-centred histories, while attempting not so much to describe developments in these now-fashionable ways but to deliver better historical explanation? I develop these ideas with reference to principles informing several case studies in the ‘history of the present’ of electronic and digital musics: from the invention of new Kenyan hip hop genres, to the active assembling and contestation of electronic music histories associated with microsound, to the hyper-reflexive play with time evident in a spate of recent ‘nostalgia’ genres. The aim is to seed new approaches to the analysis of histories—whether of electronic music, or of music per se
Data Associated with paper titled: Peptide:glycosaminoglycan hybrid hydrogels as an injectable intervention for spinal disc degeneration.
No full textDegeneration of the spinal discs is a major cause of back pain. During the degeneration process, there is a loss of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) from the proteoglycan-rich gel in the disc’s nucleus, which adversely alters biomechanical performance. Current surgical treatments for back pain are highly invasive and have low success rates; there is an urgent need for minimally-invasive approaches that restore the physiological mechanics of the spine. Here we present an injectable peptide:GAG hydrogel that rapidly self-assembles in situ and restores the mechanics of denucleated intervertebral discs. It forms a gel with comparable mechanical properties to the native tissue within seconds to minutes depending on the peptide chosen. Unlike other biomaterials that have been proposed for this purpose, these hybrid hydrogels can be injected through a very narrow 25 G gauge needle, minimising damage to the surrounding soft tissue, and they mimic the ability of the natural tissue to draw in water by incorporating GAGs. Furthermore, the GAGs enhance the gelation kinetics and thermodynamic stability of peptide hydrogels, significantly reducing effusion of injected material from the intervertebral disc (GAG leakage of 8 [1] 3% after 24 h when peptide present, compared to 39 [1] 3% when no peptide present). In an ex vivo model, we demonstrate that the hydrogels can restore the compressive stiffness of denucleated bovine intervertebral discs. Compellingly, this novel biomaterial has the potential to transform the clinical treatment of back pain by resolving current surgical challenges, thus improving patient quality of life
STRANDS people trajectories - G4S deployment
No full textA collection of detected people trajectories captured using a mobile robot during a six week deployment at offices of the G4S security company