Balloon orchestra caresses Birmingham with sleep music

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Friday May 14, 2004
Dawn chorus with a difference: hot air balloons broadcast sleep music over central Birmingham. Photo: David Sillitoe
 Anyone in Birmingham who slept through and was late for work or school had an honest, if intensely implausible, excuse. They were helplessly lulled into deeper sleep at dawn yesterday morning, by specially composed music played from a flight of hot air balloons drifting over the dozing city.
The organisers had been watching the skies carefully. After weeks of torrential rain and thunderstorms, they set off on a milky morning, with hardly a puff of wind.
The massed balloons of the Sky Orchestra took off at 6.30am, broadcasting a piece written by Dan Jones. The flutes and oboes, bird song and whale calls, were based on scientific research to promote deeper and sweeter dreams.
"You could call it a benign version of Close Encounters," Mr Jones said.
Director and musician Luke Jerram got the idea on holiday in Tunisia when he woke to the call of muezzins from minarets. "I thought of a musical landscape, which would fill the skies - and then I met a balloonist and the whole idea came together."
He and Dan Jones, who was already working on a piece of music that he intended to broadcast from rooftops, looked at research showing that 70% of dreams were full of anxiety and fear, falls and chases.
"We wanted to see if we could construct a piece of music that would actually change the percentage of unpleasant dreams," Jerram said.
When the sleepers awoke yesterday, they found leaflets on their doormats requesting reports of their dreams.
The piece launched the three-week Fierce performance festival, which has grown steadily over the last seven years.
The Sky Orchestra looked epic but cost only £3,500 and used volunteer balloonists who were thrilled by the permission to fly into Birmingham airport's air space. Farmer and balloonist Rick Vale said: "Normally we could only do this on Christmas Day."
Fierce has been associated with the wilder side of performance art. This year's festival includes The Courtesan Tales, where audience members will be strapped into a rocking chair and blindfolded, while a performer sits on their laps and whispers stories; and The Judas Cradle, based on "a torture device developed in the Middle Ages".
However, artistic director, Mark Ball, also likes to be different: "We thought doing something that was just gentle and beautiful would be quite surprising."

Black Hole Strikes Deepest Musical Note Ever Heard

Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano. The detection was made with NASA and announced at a press conference today.

The note strikes an important chord with astronomers, who say it may help them understand how the universe's largest structures, called galaxy clusters, evolve. The sound waves appear to be heating gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million light-years away, potentially solving a longstanding mystery about why the gas surrounding this cluster and others does not chill out as existing theory predicts. The gas is apparently dancing excitedly to the eons-long drone of a deep B-flat.

Black hole music

Astronomers were not surprised to find the supermassive black hole making a strong sub-bass sound. Though these greatest known matter sinks are by nature dark and invisible, they create bright and chaotic environments in which many forms of radiation -- from radio waves to visible light to X-rays -- have been recorded. These electromagnetic waves all travel at the speed of light.

Sound waves are similar, but they travel far more slowly and are more physical in nature. Sound you hear, for example, can be produced by the visible compression and expansion of a stereo speaker. The waves physically compress the stuff through which they move, be it air, water, or hot interstellar gas.

Other studies have shown that the riotous activity around black holes -- where gas is accelerated to nearly light-speed -- produces many notes that are, all together, much like music . Collectively, the cosmos produce, scientists believe, a cacophonic symphony of inaudible tunes.

Musical production appears to be ubiquitous in Nature. Scientists often call it flicker noise, and it has also been detected in the X-ray outputs of magnetic fields within our solar system. Even Earth hums its own tune. Musical analogies are found in everything from seascapes to brainwaves.

Way out of range

The 53 hours of Chandra observations revealed a note that is more than a million billion times deeper than what you can hear. "We have observed the prodigious amounts of light and heat created by black holes," said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge,
England, and leader of the study. "Now we have detected the sound."

"The Perseus sound waves are much more than just an interesting form of black hole acoustics," said Fabian's colleague Steve Allen. "These sound waves may be the key in figuring out how galaxy clusters grow." Scientists had previously observed large amounts of hot gas infusing clusters. Given what's known, the gas should cool over time, however. Cooler gas would create areas of lower pressure near the center of a cluster, causing fringe gas to fall inward. In the process, trillions of stars would form.

This isn't what astronomers see when they look at clusters, though. The Perseus cluster is the brightest known in X-rays, making it a good target for study. It has two large, bubble-shaped cavities that extend away from a central black hole. The cavities are formed by jets of material
ejected from the black hole's surroundings, and the jets have been suspected of heating the outlying gas. But scientists couldn't see how.

A special image-processing technique was used to bring out subtle changes in brightness that revealed the presence of ripples -- the sound waves.Fabian and Allen figure the sound waves, observed spreading out from the cavities, heat the gas. The amount of energy involved is staggering, equal to what would be produced if 100 million stars exploded.

A single, long-sounding note is produced by a sound wave in which the waves are the same size and shape continuously. The newfound note has been sounding, the researchers say, for about 2.5 billion years.

THE RECITAL, last evening in the chamber music room of the Erawan Hotel  by US Pianist Myron Kropp, the first appearance of Mr. Kropp in Bangkok, can only be described by this reviewer and those who witnessed Mr. Kropp's performance as one of the most interesting experiences in a very long time.

A hush fell over the room as Mr. Kropp appeared from the right of the stage, attired in black formal evening-wear with a small white poppy in his lapel. With sparse, sandy hair, a sallow complexion and a deceptively frail looking frame, the man who has repopularized Johann Sebastian Bach approached the Baldwin Concert Grand, bowed to the audience and placed himself upon the stool.

It might be appropriate to insert at this juncture that many pianists, including Mr. Kropp, prefer a bench, maintaining that on a screw-type stool they sometimes find themselves turning sideways during a particularly expressive strain. There was a slight delay, in fact, as Mr Kropp left the stage briefly, apparently in search of a bench, but returned when informed that there was none.

AS I HAVE mentioned on several other occasions, the Baldwin Concert Grand, while basically a fine instrument, needs constant attention, particularly in a climate such as Bangkok. This is even more true when the instrument is as old as the one provided in the chamber music room of the Erawan Hotel. In this humidity the felts which separate the white keys from the black tend to swell, causing an occasional key to stick, which apparently was the case last evening with the D in the second octave.

During the "raging storm" section of the D-Minor Toccata and Fugue, Mr. Kropp must be complimented for putting up with the awkward D. However, by the time the "storm" was past and he had gotten into the Prelude and Fugue in D Major, in which the second octave D plays a major role, Mr. Kropp's patience was wearing thin.

Some who attended the performance later questioned whether the awkward key justified some of the language which was heard coming from the stage during softer passages of the fugue. However, one member of the audience, who had sent his children out of the room by the midway point of the fugue, had a valid point when he commented over the music and extemporaneous remarks of Mr. Kropp that the workman who had greased the stool might have done better to use some of the grease on the second octave D. Indeed, Mr. Kropp's  stool had more than enough grease and during one passage in which the music and lyrics were both particularly violent, Mr. Kropp was turned completely around. Whereas before his remarks had been aimed largely at the piano and were therefore somewhat muted, to his surprise and that of those in the chamber music room he found himself addressing himself directly to the audience.

BUT SUCH THINGS do happen, and the person who began to laugh deserves to be severely reprimanded for this undignified behavior. Unfortunately, laughter is contagious, and by the time it had subsided and the audience had regained its composure Mr. Kropp appeared somewhat shaken. Nevertheless, he swiveled himself back into position facing the piano and, leaving the D Major Fugue unfinished, commenced on the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor.

Why the concert grand piano's G key in the third octave chose that particular time to begin sticking I hesitate to guess. However, it is certainly safe to say that Mr. Kropp himself did nothing to help matters when he began using his feet to kick the lower portion of the piano instead of operating the pedals as is generally done.

Possibly it was this jarring or the un-Bach-like hammering to which the sticking keyboard was being subjected. Something caused the right front leg of the piano to buckle slightly inward, leaving the entire instrument listing at approximately a 35-degree angle from that which is normal. A gasp went up from the audience, for if the piano had actually fallen several  of Mr. Kropp's toes if not both his feet, would surely have been broken.

It was with a sigh of relief therefore, that the audience saw Mr. Kropp slowly rise from his stool and leave the stage. A few men in the back of  the room began clapping and when Mr. Kropp reappeared a moment later it seemed he was responding to the ovation. Apparently, however, he had left to get  a red- handled fire ax  which was hung back stage in case of fire, for that  was what was in his hand.

MY FIRST REACTION at seeing Mr. Kropp begin to chop at the left leg of  the grand piano was that he was attempting to make it tilt at the same angle  as the right leg and thereby correct the list. However, when the weakened  legs finally collapsed altogether with a great crash and Mr. Kropp continued  to chop, it became obvious to all that he had no intention of going on with  the concert.

The ushers, who had heard the snapping of piano wires and splintering of sounding board from the dining room, came rushing in and, with the help  of the hotel manager, two Indian watchmen and a passing police corporal, finally succeeded in disarming Mr. Kropp and dragging him off the stage.