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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.
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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.”
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( applause )
Paul Miller: Thank you.
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