CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Domenico Vicinanza will present his work and then we’ll facilitate a discussion around the use of scientific data in sonification.

Domenico Vicinanza is a musician and a scientist. He received his  PhD degrees in Physics working at the European Laboratory for  Particle Physics (CERN, Geneva) and he is a professional music  composer and orchestrator. Always fascinated by how music and  science are a continuous quest for harmony, he was one of the  pioneer of data sonification for scientific and artistic purposes.  Since the end of 1990s he supported scientists in different fields,  from hydrobiology to cosmology, from earth science to particle  physics providing, through sound, different perspectives to their  data.

At the same time he worked on the artistic aspect of writing music  from science, creating music pieces by mapping scientific  structures to melodies and sounds. He organised several concerts  with different ensembles, from solo instruments to chamber and  symphonic orchestras, playing music from science. He has an active  collaboration with CERN, which commissioned an orchestral piece on  scientific data, for their 60th anniversary and with NASA, writing  music from data collected by the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. He  has been lecturer in Algorithmic composition, Audio technology and  Computer music at the University of Salerno in Italy, the  Conservatories of Salerno and Avellino (Italy) and he is currently  part-time lecturer at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge  (UK). Finally, he is also involved in the application of  distributed computing and advanced networking technologies to music  and visual arts as the founder and technical coordinator of the  ASTRA (Ancient instrument Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application)  and the Lost Sounds Orchestra projects for the reconstruction of  musical instruments on the Research and Education networks GÉANT  and EUMEDCONNECT.