Correction: Tones from the changing temperature of the compost can be heard on overhead speakers. Due to a reporting error, the method of listening to the tones was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

A simple tune can be created by the clap of the hands, a strum on the guitar or, for Riverside artist J. no.e Parker, decaying matter.

For the past year, Parker has found a way to make music out of compost from her backyard through a process called data sonification. On Saturday, June 27, Parker takes her concept to the Sweeney Gallery at UC Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, with her exhibit “Composing [De]Composition.”

Akin to how data visualization takes information and presents it through charts and graphs, data sonification presents it as sounds rather than visuals. Parker, a digital music composition doctoral candidate at UC Riverside, will be collecting data in the exhibit over the next few months before using it to compose an original piece.

“I’m not just taking compost and holding it, thinking I’m going to make this song out of this,” Parker said. “I’m looking at this whole cycle and thinking, if I’m going to collect data over it, what am I going to collect?”

The idea came from her longtime desire to combine art with science. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Parker began as an engineering student, but she wanted to be an artist as well. Without a major that combined both study areas, she switched her focus to fashion design and textiles. It was the only program where she could learn more about art while still being able to learn a little about science.

Parker, 47, with multicolored red and faded blue hair and an animated and jovial demeanor, is someone constantly in motion – whether globetrotting or talking about her project. She spent seven years as an experimental DJ and electronic musician and has studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan music at the Indonesian National Conservatory in Java and currently studies Hindustani tabla drumming at UC Riverside.

She was introduced to composting when she lived in the Bay Area in the early ’90s, and her interest grew further while living in Indonesia a decade later. There, a friend invited her out to see the local dump and composting facility in Bali.

“I’d never seen composting in that scale,” Parker said. “My visit to the industrial composter just really, really inspired me. There’s all this life coming out of rotting material; it’s kind of weird.”

She returned to the U.S. in 2005 to attend UC Santa Cruz, and she and her husband continued composting. In 2010, she moved to Riverside to work on her doctoral degree.

When she needs to unwind from the pressures of school, Parker heads to her garden to tend to the fruits and vegetables she grows.

“When I’m stressed out I go out and I just hang out in the garden. … So I thought if I work with compost, I can kind of combine those two things and maybe I’ll find a bit more inner peace, I guess,” Parker said.

And it was when she was gardening that she had the idea of creating music from compost.

OPENING NOTES

She had the concept, but didn’t know how to execute it. There were no music or composting how-to books she could use.

So she returned to her love of math and science and began to experiment. Since music is mathematically based, Parker had to decide what type of data she could collect or how she would get the tones for her music.

“What’s the easiest way to collect data about compost? What am I going to do, count how many bugs are in it?” she said.

As she pondered the process, Parker realized each section of compost has a different temperature due to gases that are released during the different stages of the composting cycle. She decided to measure the various temperatures, which would then be used to create tones on a computer using a special program, with the ultimate goal of making music out of the data.

Over time, Parker realized that she would need more than one thermometer, and that a simple household model wasn’t up for the task.

“At first I was just in my compost in my backyard sticking a meat thermometer, just one of those analog ones, just going, ‘OK, what’s the temperature?’” Parker said. “ I did that for a couple of weeks and then I realized, this is really hard.”

With the help of people like Adrian Freed, the research director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley, Parker was able to design and create what she needed. The device has eight sensors that measure temperature. Parker also wrote the computer program that takes the data from the sensing apparatus and converts each temperature reading to hertz, or an assigned tone.

The end result is a unique collection of hums documenting the decay of the matter.

Pitch correlates to temperature

For the exhibit at the Culver Center, the art installation comprises a large, black 10-gallon bin of backyard compost with the sensing device, which is connected to a computer that records and displays the data for spectators.

Headphones connect to the computer for visitors to hear the raw tones that the computer assigns the temperatures. The higher the temperature, the higher the pitch. The higher tones are sharper and play faster, like a zap of noise not unlike the buzz of the Emergency Alert System. The lower tones build up and drag ominously to a finish, as if a jet was passing by in slow motion.

The apparatus is also connected to Parker’s homemade set of speakers that hang from the ceiling. A different instrument is assigned to each speaker. When the temperature changes, which can happen in minutes or sometimes hours, the tone is recorded on the computer. The sound coming out of the speakers correlates to the changing temperatures of the compost, to create the gallery’s soundscape as well as make a different sound to signal every time the temperature changes.

The rest of the gallery includes an “ongoing research wall” including graphs, photos and a piece of music she wrote using old data. Two digital screens fill another wall – one will play a slideshow of composting stages, including images Parker took using a microscope. The second screen allows visitors to view past data. To demonstrate the different stages of compost, a set of large Mason jars sits against the back wall of the gallery. The jars are filled with compost and labeled with the dates they were started. Each jar is in a different stage.

Parker plans to take the data and tones she collects from the exhibit and write music from them. When that is finished, she will present the piece with other musicians in a concert on the last day of the exhibit, Oct. 17.

After Parker finishes her study at UC Riverside, she hopes to apply to post-doctoral research programs in order to continue her research at the facility in Bali that deepened her composting roots.

Contact the writer: dgomez@pe.com