Transcript of this week’s episode.

Part One

This is it, gang. The end! You’ve made it through. Take a moment, and look back at everything you’ve done this term. Look at your glorious failures. Look at your spectacular successes. Each one of you has at least one of both! You’ve come a long way, as the advertisement used to have it.

We’re ending the term by looking at digital creativity, computational creativity, gaming, and augmented reality. I firmly believe that creative engagement with the past opens our perception to understanding more about the past than what we might first believe to be possible. I’m interested in sonification, for instance, but not just hearing the past, but remixing it, too. Sonification maps aspects of the information against things like timbre, scale, instrumentation, rhythm, and beats-per-minute to highlight aspects of the data that a visual representation might not pick up. It’s also partly about making something strange—we’ve become so used to visual representations of information that we don’t necessarily recognize the ways assumptions about it are encoded in the visual grammars of barcharts and graphs. By trying to represent historical information in sound, we have to think through all of those basic decisions and elaborate on their implications. If you’re interested in trying it out, let me know; there’s a tutorial on the Programming Historian website that’ll get you started.

The opening music for this podcast is a sound based representation of archaeological data, by the way. It’s built on 2000 rows of data from the excavations at the Italian site of Poggio Civitate. I built chords by translating the latitude and longitude and the counts of objects for different classes of objects onto relative positions on the 88 key keyboard. Then, archaeologist Andrew Reinhard remixed these sonic representations to represent how archaeological materials interpenetrate in the soil matrix. In the beginning, they are harmonious and in time, but because of subtle variations in bpm, by the time the song ends the data have become messy and frenetic, a reflection of the scattered pieces within the archaeological record, something that happens over time. Each movement in the song corresponds to an isolated data thread, which then loops back in with the others to see how they relate.

3,000 years ago, at a plateau in the tufa landscape of southern Etruria, people lived their lives, only to have their debris carefully collected, studied, systematized, counted, digitized, and exposed online. No longer things but data, these counts and spaces were mapped to simple sonic dimensions using a web-toy, making a moderately pleasing experience. Remixed, the music moves us, enchants us, towards pausing and thinking through the material, the labour, the meanings, of a digital archaeology. If/when this song is performed in a club, the dancers would then be embodying our archaeological knowledge of Poggio in their movements, in the flows and subtle actions/reactions their bodies make across the floor. In dancing, we achieve a different kind of knowledge of the world, that reconnects us with the physicality of the world. The eruptions of deep time into the present – such as that encountered at an archaeological site – are weird and taxing and require a certain kind of trained imagination to engage with. But by turning the data into music, we let go of our authority over imagination, and let the dancers perform what they know.

Using the new music bridges the gap between humans past and present and in dancing we (and hopefully you) embody the data we present. It’s a new connection to something old, and is experienced by bodies. Archaeology is often a cerebral enterprise, which deserves—at times—a good ass-shaking derived from a driving beat.

Part Two

This week, we are joined by Dr. Katherine Cook of the University of Montreal.