Alexis Weaver and Dr Geosmin Turpin
Alexis is an Associate Lecturer at the Conservatorium of Music and PhD Candidate with the SCOPE Group in the School of Chemistry. Dr Geosmin Turpin is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Neto Group, as well as a poet in her spare time.
EXPLORING THE NANO WORLD THROUGH POETRY AND SOUND
On the 20th July, Dr Geosmin Turpin and I presented a concert entitled Sensitive Instruments at Local Edition, a performance venue in Glebe. The concert showcased Geosmin’s original poetry, my electronic music, and our interdisciplinary collaborative work which celebrates Atomic Force Microscopy – not your average new music concert!
Local Edition also serves as a homeware store and art gallery during the day. Owner Majid runs the store alongside a team of caring and creative employees, including Hamed and Shervin, who coordinate and curate the after-hours musical events. When we first came to Shervin with our idea for an interdisciplinary concert combining poetry, electronic music and science, he was extremely supportive. Once I got to know the mission statement of Local Edition – a store that aims to foster conversation and connection across cultures and fields of knowledge – that no longer seemed so surprising.
The store layout encourages its visitors to linger. Carefully chosen art pieces and homewares are displayed on long tables, often accompanied by the story and the image of each maker or artist. The wooden floor boasts ornate, richly coloured rugs; the air is perfumed, and the walls are papered with posters of upcoming events. All to say – this is a place to sit, to meander through conversations, and to relax. The opposite of what you might expect to encounter in one of the School of Chemistry’s laboratories just up the road.
This setting seemed like the perfect place to perform a piece about the joy and messiness of human scientific endeavour.
Soft Matter, Hypersensitive Instruments is an electroacoustic work (read: a musical work which draws on electronic and acoustic sounds) which draws inspiration from the nanoscale imaging technique of Atomic Force Microscopy. First created for Italy’s La Biennale di Venezia in 2023, I based the sound component of the work on Dr Turpin’s original poem of the same name. Geosmin is a physical chemist whose creative practice pirates the language of her nanoscale research to explore emotional and relational experiences.
As a music person (who isn’t a scientist), this poem provided a window into the colourful world of a physical chemist who is deeply tied to her field. The depth of emotion in this poetry influenced a work which is quite textural, rhythmic, noisy and gritty. In other words…I had an absolute field day!
A snippet of Geosmin’s poetry.
Tuning hypersensitive fingers, lit by sniper sight
mixing repulsive revelations, adoration and abrasion
Dislocated data devotions
In a combination of obsession and attention
The sounds of the music are predominantly derived from my and Geosmin’s voices. As the poetry was so central to the making of the music, it felt right to use the sounds of the words themselves as the basic building blocks. We both recorded ourselves reciting the poem, and then I took tiny snippets of the recorded words and looped them, so they created new musical notes, rhythms and textures. The effect, I hope, is of ‘waves of sound’ which undulate in and out of the listener’s hearing; my attempt to reflect the ups and downs of the AFM needle on a nanomaterial’s surface. In this way, we are almost performing microscopy on the human voice as well.
We used Graphene Oxide as a secondary inspiration for the poem and the music. Graphene Oxide’s hexagonal structure of carbon atoms inspired me to create a 6/8 rhythm which moves spatially around the audience. Luckily for us, Local Edition gave us four speakers to surround the audience with. My hope is that they feel like they are inside a two-dimensional Graphene Oxide layer (but that may take some explaining!).
Whether the audience understands the specific inspirations that inform each part of the music, or the poetry, or not at all, we hope that they will feel some sense of artistic fulfilment from being a part of this event. This work is, after all, an experiment. We wanted to explore whether science can inspire meaningful art, and whether art can help people understand the significance and the wonder of scientific discovery.
Our goal for this concert was to create a warm, welcoming space where we could converse with our audience in between the performances. As academics and artists in different disciplines, we both love talking about our craft. Some musicians believe too much explanation can take away from the artistic experience – abstract art can be very enjoyable, after all! But this work is born out of a mixture of traditions: scientific, musical, and poetic. We wanted to give the audience the tools to understand our inspiration and strike a balance between a didactic and artistic experience.
The concert itself was warm, laid back, and not free from technical mishaps – as imperfect and human as scientific process itself. It was attended by members of the Chemistry and Music Schools, as well as curious concert goers from the wider community. We hope it will be the first of many interdisciplinary music concerts that aim to excite and engage new audiences in science.
You can listen to excerpts of Soft Matter, Hypersensitive Instruments here, and read the extended program note here.