Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a National Geographic emerging explorer and a hip-hop legend. Composing music that melds his inventive digital applications and live musicians, DJ Spooky weaves together an evocative multimedia trip to the Arctic landscape.
The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.
Paul Miller: If many of you are aware of my music over the last 20 or 15 years or so, I have always... kind of engaged with the idea that digital media is about this notion of a global vocabulary. And I firmly believe that as we move further into the 21st century, one of the major issues facing us is climate change. I don't think it's a debate, I don't think it's something where the numbers and the science is unsettled. It's very clear that this is a major issue. But I also think it's very clear that the arts have an incredible and very powerful role to play in raising awareness. So, tonight what I want to do is walk you through some of the issues that face me as a composer. And I also want to kind of walk you all through my hard drive here, some of the issues that I'm thinking about as I look at the role of the composer and the artist and the writer and this era of just very, very radical change in the environment.
So, what I want to do is walk you guys through some of the material that drives, why I think the Arctic is so important. I ended up writing a book about the Arctic and Antarctic, but mainly from the viewpoint of science. First, we looked at proto-scientists... Galileo and Kepler. And Johannes Kepler, in 1611 he was on his way home and a snowflake landed on his sleeve. And essentially this is considered to be one of the first mathematical treatises looking at how... mathematics in nature are in dialogue. And I love thinking about that because he ends up writing this essay, Six Sides Of A Snowflake. And what ends up happening is... that set the tone for how we think about geometry in nature. So let me just show you... kind of what that looks like as I think it's always important. Here... when you see an ice piece of crystal here, you are seeing essentially permutation of form. You are seeing a geometry at work, a very beautiful precise sense of nature. And above all, what ends up happening is... this is pure mathematics. So the song you are about to hear is called Ice Sonification and it's based on this idea that Johannes Kepler's essays and his equations generated a whole sensibility that... here we are in the era of algorithms.
Next thing you know, we can take that math and make it become music. So, let's lead you through it. This is what they call Max MSP patch and this is the music and software that you're going to be hearing in a moment. Essentially what we do is take the equations, plug it into the software and use it to generate mathematically correct, very specific sound patterns and again you are going to be seeing, that basically the mathematical equivalent of ice.
My next book actually is about apps and design and I was really interested in the tension between those instruments, which are incredibly beautiful instruments. The cello has been around for several hundred years, the violin also has a long history. How do we figure on the role of apps and design in a modern sensibility with a composer who is very intrigued by data? So, I came up with an iPad app and what we are going to be doing now is essentially as a virtual string quartet with two turntables, violin and cello.
So when I was in the Arctic Circle with the Sierra Club crew, we ended up meeting this incredible tribe called the Gwich'in people and they are one of the oldest nations... first nations in North America. They are over 20,000 years old civilization. And I took a long walk with one of their tribal elders and they would just look... pointing at the landscape, I said, this is quite beautiful, it's really amazing, and the guy was essentially like “well, we don't know how to describe this, it shouldn't be green, you know.” I was like, “Oh!” you know. So for me as a Southerner, you know someone from DC, going to one of the most remote northern parts of the U.S. and seeing green, I thought that was amazing. For them, it was a sign of disaster. So this next piece is dedicated to the people that think that there's no debate about climate change. So, this next piece is called... Check Your Math.
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a National Geographic emerging explorer and a hip-hop legend. Composing music that melds his inventive digital applications and live musicians, DJ Spooky weaves together an evocative multimedia trip to the Arctic landscape.
The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.
