Tau

The tau neutrino is last of the leptons, and the most recent particle of the Standard Model to be discovered. The DONUT experiment, which stands for Direct Observation of the Nu Tau at Fermilab was built during the 1990s to specifically detect the tau neutrino. These efforts came to fruition in July 2000, when the DONUT collaboration reported its detection. With this discovery, only one Standard Model particle remains undiscovered – the so called Higgs boson.

Tau is a realtime performance piece for the INA/GRM Acousmonium plus eight channel surround setup, based on spatial and spectral mappings of dense layers of filtered microscopic sound particles.

The piece uses an edited version of Studies for Thunder from 2005 as a structural skeleton, which defines the progression of sonic events. Individual noise bursts from that piece serve as anchor points from which new material is emerging. This new material has been derived from 'outtakes' of Studies for Thunder, mainly by applying various types of pitch shifting and time stretching, both FFT based and via classic granular approaches.

The basic idea behind Studies for Thunder was to create a convincing virtual thunderstorm. For Tau, realism was not a goal anymore, but rather the construction of a closed world that is both microscopic and incredibly huge at the same time.

During the performance individual layers are filtered, mixed and distributed in space, using an ambisonics inspired technique that includes doppler shift and distance dependent filtering. Real time parameters control the movements of the sounds fed to the eight speaker ring, and the distribution of the signals for the Acousmonium, which sums up to a total number of 26 channels of sound all around, above, and behind the audience.

Tau has been composed for the festival Presences Electroniques in Geneva / Switzerland. The Premiere is on Saturday, December 11th, 2011. Duration of the piece is 30 minutes.

Tau Wave Field Synthesis Version

For the Club Transmediale Festival 2011 , Tau has been adapted to work with the 832 channel WFS system at the TU-Berlin. The ambisonics spatialization of the original version has been replaced by a Max patch which sends a continuous stream of position data to the system, based on the concept developed for the piece Iron Age (2010), but with real time control over the movement via a multi-touch interface.

Date: February 6 2011. 18:00 Location: TU Berlin, mathematics building, room H 104.