This Music Is Radioactive

You can fall down some very deep rabbit holes if you develop an interest in generative music. Unlike traditional music that is carefully and explicitly composed by the creator, generative music is the algorithmic result of inputs. It is a bit like the auditory equivalent of procedurally generated video game levels. Like those levels, the result can change based on the inputs. But if you want it to be truly unpredictable, you need randomized input. To achieve that for use in performance art, The Edison Union turned to radioactive material as the input for his generative music.

Digital devices, like computers, can’t produce random numbers on their own. They operate on Boolean logic, so any number they come up with is the predictable result of mathematical operations on some arbitrary input. To get a true random number, a computer needs a “seed” (the initial input) pulled from some unpredictable source. Often, programmers take advantage of the noise created by electromagnetic interference. In this case, The Edison Union chose to utilize radiation in order to fit the theme of his project, The Cherenkov Effect, which explores the nuclear anxiety found throughout the world in the 1980s.

The Edison Union selected two sources of radiation: Strontium-90 and Polonium-210. Those are easier to handle than some of the particularly nasty radioactive materials out there, but they aren’t safe and you shouldn’t play with them yourself.

To detect the radiation coming from those materials, The Edison Union purchased five inexpensive Geiger counter modules. An Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board monitors the output from the Geiger counter modules, keeping track of the pulses. As the radioactive materials move around the five Geiger counters, the pulse frequency detected by each one varies.

The Arduino then passes that pulse data onto a Processing sketch, which performs the algorithmic music generation. Those algorithms are the “secret sauce” that turns the seeds (the pulses) into sound. The Edison Union can tweak those algorithms to produce whatever results he likes, but the initial input variables always come from the radiation detected by the Geiger counters.

The Processing sketch algorithms spit out note information, which then goes to Ableton Live to become actual sound. Once again, The Edison Union has some creative freedom here to influence the final music. He can apply different effects or make the notes match the timbre of specific instruments to achieve the sound that he likes for The Cherenkov Effect.

This is a very complex way to produce music, but it fits the theme of the performance and is quite interesting from a technical perspective.