Ground
Works

The Green Light SONATA project originated with a hunch in the engineering domain, but could only materialize through true collaboration of researchers working across disciplines. The project tested the hypothesis that translating simulated traffic information into music could lead to musical resolution of persistent traffic congestion. Our team—consisting of civil engineers, a composer/performer/computer music researcher, and an ethnomusicologist—proceeded to construct a model of an intersection in which each direction of traffic flow was assigned a musical pitch. Hearing these pitches as cues, musicians could interact with the sonified traffic to allow vehicles to proceed through the intersection. The result was a musical “gamification” of traffic flow in which the goal was to minimize the vehicles’ idle time. The next stage of this project will include public demonstration and testing sessions, involving students and additional musicians, to assess the concept’s viability, refine our methods, and gather further data. The team’s multidisciplinary dialogue takes us on productive tangents translating between different domains of musical and technical expertise. Moving forward, we plan to test additional methods of data sonification, manipulating additional musical variables (including pulse and rhythm, sequence, scales, ornaments, and other musical elements) and scaling up to model multiple consecutive intersections.

From 2009-2011, we worked together at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Broad Institute, n.d.), building on a study (Lieberman-Aiden & Van Berkum et al., 2009) that made it possible to explore how the human genome, the DNA contained in every cell of the body, folds in 3D. At the outset of our collaboration, our approaches seemed so different as to be, perhaps, incommensurable. The scientists used tools like mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology, whereas the artistic toolkit was focused on the construction of physical objects, with a defined shape, area, and volume. Yet over time, we came to realize that all of these tools were addressing the same goal: making invisible concepts manifest as an experience intelligible to the senses. From the beginning of the project, we worked together creating drawings. Over time, our interactions evolved to become free-flowing conversations while drawing, which became a way of seeing together. Our visual experimentations grew into a body of drawings, paintings, prints, mixed-media artworks, wood blocks, a dynamic video installation, and a suspended wire sculpture (Ranganathan, 2021), and helped advance the scientific community’s understanding of how the human genome folds.