Dancing the structure of a molecule + scent vs music revisited

Some time ago I caught a glimpse of a headline about some researchers "dancing their natural science projects", more specifically a biochemist dancing the structure of certain biochemical compounds. I thought the idea was rather far-fetched and didn't give it further thought. After seeing it just recently I find myself being so very wrong... Second part of the post contains a few recent thoughts about a project on scent vs. music.

Have a look at the video below. In the start of the video I didn't see the point, but after a while things started to dawn on me.

Lipids Dance! from Kerstin Wagner on Vimeo.

After watching the video I realised that this did indeed illustrate behaviour of the molecules in question in a very vivid way. I'm of the opinion that one should look for as many possible ways of describing and explaining a phenomenon as possible. If a student tells you they don't understand what you're saying there is seldom any help in repeating the same words one more time. You need to find new words, some other metaphor, another mental representation.

The first(?) example of molecular gastronomy in music

More music than science lately, but this one is inevitable:
Recently, the improvisational electroacoustic jazz band Food released their fifth record named "molecular gastronomy"!

Furthermore, seeing the track list, I was baffled by the rather specific concepts taken directly from molecular gastronomy (MG), such as khymos (Martin Lersch's blog), spherification and texturas (ref. the Texturas series by Ferran Adrià at el Bulli) and heston (Blumenthal, at The Fat Duck).

At first, I wondered whether this was a joke, serious, or somewhere in between. Qualitywise, this is by no means a joke. Both from previous recordings and this one, Iain Ballamy (sax) and Thomas Strønen (drums/perc) prove that they are among the foremost in their field, no doubt. Other band constellations they are engaged in confirms this as well.

So, is it possible to hear the gastronomy in the music? (ref. previous posts on food and chemistry/food vs. music). That's a difficult question, and I'm not sure whether I should look for it either. My experience with using other senses than my ears as impulse to improvisation is that things become rather banal if one lets the impulses become too evident in the music. One example when we (Quest) played together with the Norwegian poet and author Lars Amund Vaage reading his poems about sheep farmers from the book "Det andre rommet". The one percussion instrument to be extremely careful about in that context, at least in my opinion, was the (cow) bell.

Anyway, I guess taste, aroma etc. are such unfamiliar impulses to use in music compared to visual (i.e. pictures) and text, that the effect of these may be difficult to discern (I'd really love to have a chat with the Food-guys about this).

I'll surely spend time listening to this, food/gastronomy references or not. Strønen is no doubt a favourite in terms of combining energy, cool-factor and elegance. Coupled with the long mellow saxophone lines of Ballamy and keyboards/effects, the result is simply great music.

Erik

Post-comment after more listening, 16. December 2007:
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After running the album a few more times, the question of hearing the food in the music is still a long shot to me. What is pretty clear, however, is that the music is closely connected to many of the track names; it's easy to relate/associate the music to the words. Examples are the machine like percussion (especially the bells) in "apparatus", the less rythmic and soft lines of "texturas", and the last track "alchemy" which is a synthesis (or maybe a distillate) of several of the other tracks. So, the search for food/gastronomy in music goes on, or maybe it's already there, the fault being in my mind or expectations?


Track list:
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khymos
apparatus
red algae
lota
spherification
texturas
nature's recipe
heston
the larder chef
alchemy

A short note on taste/food as a impulse to making music

Spurred by a recent comment a previous posting about chemistry and music, I thought I'd leave a few thoughts about chemistry/taste/scent/aroma vs. music; most of all just to have them written hem down, really.

At the moment I haven't come any further with this apart from day to day musing. The main idea is that as a large proportion of taste is in fact aroma; what is perceived through the nose receptors rather than the tongue. In our "improjazz" band Quest (www.questmusic.no and myspace music) we've used both visual arts (photography) and text/poetry as impulse to making improvised music. These are both impulses received by our senses (visual and auditory). However, taste and aroma are very powerful impulses in association making. Just imagine how the smell of a dish that you've not tasted since you were a small child, or the perfume of the grandmother you spent a lot of time together with as young, may set you right back to situations years back in time in a way that few other impulses do. To me this happens especially in smelling and/or tasting food I had a lot of as a child, or had in a special situation.

So, my thoughts these days circle around the possibilities that lie in using smell as impulse for me as a musician to create music, in the same way as hearing a poem or seeing a photography/painting/picture. I suppose this leans towards some sort of performance art, although other arts than music aren't my field of expertise in any way.

Finally, one interesting thing I came across through Martin's khymos blog was Aroma jockey. This relates very closely to the thoughts above, but to me it seems like he uses recorded music. I'd love to see where this could lead in cooperation with live musicians.

Erik

About intersections - music, chemistry and food

In my opinion, some of the most interesting and creative things happen in the intersections between fields of interest. My fate is being both experimental chemist and experimental musician/percussionist, maybe a less-that-obvious combination to look for intersections, but none the more a good reason to construct one. I'm not talking about the more obvious connections between music and chemistry/food/taste/smell (see below), but intersections where chemistry/food/... has a direct impact on the creation or (in my case) performance, of music.

Playing in a improvisation-based jazz trio (just start playing, no songs, arrangements or agreements), I'm constantly looking for things that could trigger new musical ideas. Visual triggers are relatively common (Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Kari Bremnes and Edvard Munch), but what about scent or taste? What kind of improvised music would result from the scent of rotten eggs, roasted meat, cinnamon etc.? And next: what if the scent was created on-the-go carrying out the chemical reactions while playing? This tastes of futurism, doesn't it? Another idea could be to feed digital data from chemical measurements and analyses into a music computer program using some sort of conversion from chemical data to pitch, rhythm, tempo, dynamics and so forth.

Master chef Pierre Gagnaire has some fascinating thoughts about similarities between music, improvisation and gastronomy, among them:
"[...]I imagine a flavour like a melody, then explore new ground with anxiety but determination to shape an ephemeral jewel from the magical treasures of discovery[...]" - beautiful, and such a striking description of my experiences from freely improvised music as well!

Also, a possibly interesting compilation of scientists/musicians/composers is the New Trier High School Mixing Art/Music and/or Science and Math page


A few more obvious (and thus less interesting?) connections between music and food, molecular gastronomy, chemistry:
- music to accompany food (background music in restaurants). This could be interesting if the music actively comments the food (or vice versa), or even better, if they affect each other.
- musicians/composers that are/were chemists; i.e. A. Borodin)
- chemistry in making instruments; materials, lacquer/varnish etc. (less interesting, maybe, because it's too far a reach for me...)

The search goes on, at a slow pace however, as this is a long term project.

Erik