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Feature - DANTE dances to the volcano
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In late March, an American modern dance company on
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tour in Cambridge, England, performed to some truly
User Support “earth-shaking” music, created by DANTE engineer
Events Domenico Vicinanza. His collaborators in creating the
music were . . . volcanoes from Italy, Ecuador and the
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Philippines.
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EUAsiaGrid Contacts Researchers have long sought to predict a volcano’s

Glossary
eruptions by looking for patterns in its seismic behavior.
With the use of complex sonification algorithms,
Site Map Vicinanza found he could take recordings of a volcano’s
seismic behavior and translate what he found into
audible sound waves, thereby transforming the raw
Events Calendar
seismic data into something easier to use for predicting
S M T W T F S eruptions. Doin’ the volcano dance.
31 1 2 3 4 5 6 Image this page and
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Intrigued, Vicinanza went one step further, using the previous page courtesy
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 computational power of the grid to convert audible sound CityDance Ensemble
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 waves from multiple volcanoes — Mount Etna, Mount
28 29 30 1 2 3 4 Tungurahua, and the Mountains Pinatubo and Mayon — into a melody, which he then
composed into music for a dance performance

News Links And on March 25, in Cambridge, UK, the modern dance company City Dance
Ensemble performed to his volcanic music. The dance, titled “The Mountain,” was part
of the ensemble’s Carbon, a larger work about climate change. Originally presented in
sold-out performances on March 14 and 15 at the Music Center at Strathmore,
Maryland, it was later repeated on March 28 and 29. (The dance is also available to
view or to download.)

Songs of the Earth

“As a scientist, it was my priority to develop

tools to help us predict eruptions and ultimately
reduce the loss of lives,” said Vicinanza. “As a
musician and artist, it was a natural step for me
to take these seismic sonification sounds and
apply them to the arts. I am delighted that the
results, or songs of the earth, are being
created into a dance performance.”

Mayon Volcano, one of the most
photographed mountains in the
Philippines, is known for its majestic
beauty — and its destructive
CERN Land
eruptions. It was also one of four
volcanoes whose sound waves
became music, via a computer
algorithm and the computational
power of the grid. Image courtesy
Dexter Baldon, sxc.hu
First of its kind, the computations for the event
were run on DANTE, EGEE, and the E-science
grid facility for Europe and Latin America, or
EELA. (The complex sonification algorithms
that convert the seismic data into sound
melodies require the power of the grid, as the
process would be nearly impossible using
standard bandwidth networks or computing
resources.) Research and education data
communications networks GÉANT2 in Europe
and TEIN3 in the Asia-Pacific, both operated

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EUAsiaGrid - Feature - Dante dances to the volcano http://www.euasiagrid.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&fu...

Login Form by DANTE, as well as Latin America’s RedCLARA operated by CLARA, underpin the
immense computing power provided by EGEE in Europe and EELA in Latin America.
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For his part, Paul Gordon Emerson, CityDance Ensemble choreographer and Carbon
Password curator, said: “High bandwidth research and education internet networks together with
grid computing power played a vital part in making this project a reality . . . the fact that
this work uses the voices of the earth from three continents is a very powerful
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metaphor for Carbon as a project and as a concept.”
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Lost Password? —Dan Drollette, iSGTW
Tags: Americas Disaster management Entertainment Europe Feature Humanities
ISGTW Home Page: http://www.isgtw.org

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