The Soliton Crossing is a series of audio visual performances that explores various wave phenomena, interference and noise, in the human world as well as at cosmic scales. Using custom computer software that synchronizes and harmonizes the frequencies and sequencing of sound and light, the performance tunes sound and light waves in and out of harmony with various resonant frequencies, standing waves and other cyclic phenomena in the physical universe, causing various patterns to emerge and propagate as the result of their interference.
The project is loosely based on the idea of Musica Universalis, an ancient philosophical concept that associated the proportional movements of celestial bodies to musical harmonies (the infamous “harmony of spheres”). It was thought that the cycles and rhythms observed in the universe obeyed a kind of cosmic harmony, an inaudible music. Modern technology allows us to transpose these frequencies and rhythms from scales too large or too little for us to perceive, to the human ranges of audible sound and visible light. In addition to transposing the frequency of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the its rotation upon its axis, The Soliton Crossing also harmonizes to the frequency of local electrical systems (60 Hz in North America), the ELFs of the standing waves in the atmosphere (known as the Schumann Resonances: 7.83, 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz), as well as the resonant frequencies of the room in which the performances are presented. These various local and universal oscillations, of course, do not generally harmonize (as was thought by the proponents of Musica Universalis), and so when they are combined, their interference and phase differences create diffraction patterns. The idea is to create a ritual around emergence in the cosmos as the effect of the interference of various propagating forces.
The installations usually consist of an array of speakers and an array of RGB light projections. The oscillation frequencies to be treated are entered into the software and mapped to the temporal variables: tonal frequencies, chromatic frequencies, rhythmic pulses of light and sound, and several LFO modulations. During the performance, using an interface of knobs and sliders, I improvise with the sound and light patterns by dispatching the source frequencies to the variables, and changing their octave transpositions, harmonic amplitudes, phases differences, and noise levels, in effect “playing” with their interference and propagation.