My piece Oscillate is included in ICA Soundworks, an exhibition to coincide with Bruce Nauman’s work “Days” at the ICA, London. As part of its season on sound, the ICA commissioned more than a hundred artists to make a work that takes its stimulus from the themes evoked in “Days”. The works are available online and within the gallery at the ICA until September 16th. Oscillate is made from the BiSON data that I used for my recent sound installation, 5 Minute Oscillations of the Sun. The piece is a study of sine waves that relate to the natural resonances within the sun. A sine wave can be thought of as a mathematical description of time and the patterns brought about by combining different sine waves can produce a hovering, non-teleological sense of time that I seek to explore.

The image below is a spectrogram of the piece with time along the x axis and frequency along the y axis. All the frequencies used in Oscillate are direct transpositions of acoustic waves that manifest as gentle oscillations of the solar surface and have been measured by the BiSON research team at Birmingham University. The data has been sped up a million times to bring it within the frequency range of human hearing.