Newcastle Astronomical Society, "The Sounds of Space", 8th October 2004.

Sounds of Space 2004

I'm not sure if I should class this as a "proper" gig or not but I'll include it for the sake of being "complete".

Every year or so, Newcastle Astronomical Society holds a "member's night" where individuals are invited to stand up in front of the society and talk about whatever butters their particular muffin. That year, my old friend David Sinden, had been invited to talk but, alas, David was ill and so a couple of us stepped in at short notice to help out. Somehow, I managed to grab the headline slot, probably because I had more gear to set up than anyone else. The members certainly got more than they bargained for that night.

The subject of my talk was The Sounds of Space with the subtitle In space, no one can hear you scream..., which gave me a good opportunity to arse about in front of a lot of people talking about various astronomical signals such as jovian whistlers, meteor trails and quasars and then make lots of noise. What you do is take a set of data values and manipulate them so that they produce a musically useful sound. This isn't a new idea. I ripped it off Tomita, I think.

Anyway, I used some of the quasar pulses to generate pretty convincing kick drums, some jovian whistlers to create special effects and some noise from the Big Bang to create some snare drum sounds. All very good fun.

The lecture finished with a shortened version of "Waving at Mono", which left a few members checking their hearing aids.

Not really a proper gig but sort of a proper gig.