Origins
I had heard of lowercase music, a subgenre of noise music so subtle that it does not bother anyone. You need to actively look for it to find it. Supposedly, it can be produced by crinkling paper or making grass grow. At work, I collect a lot of experimental data, mostly contact forces and surface roughness measurements. So, I asked myself, “What if I made this data audible?”
I turned to MATLAB, a software and coding environment that I also use for much of my scientific work. While my choice for processing text will always be Python, MATLAB comes in handy when dealing with numerical data. Once I realized that digital sound, much like my experimental data, is essentially just numbers, suddenly everything seemed possible.
The obvious approach was to link the one-dimensional input data to the pitch of the audio output. This means a higher value in the dataset leads to a faster oscillation of the speaker membrane and, therefore, to a higher sound. Additionally, the data can be repeated, modulated by stretching or compression, and mapped to a range audible for humans. Further smoothing of the data eliminates much of the noise, resulting in less grainy and less metallic sounds. However, I quickly decided to let randomness take control over my project, so I only specified a range for each parameter and marveled at the variety of sound samples it produced.
Before I knew it, I had coded a clumsy but workable synthesizer. If you paid close attention, you can now almost guess what “ADME” stands for. In case you are a physician, pharmacologist, or biochemist, the congruence with the established acronym for “administration, distribution, metabolism, excretion” (of drugs) was unintended, but embraced after the fact. No, ADME was supposed to become an “Any Data Modulation Engine.” In other words, my goal was to turn any data files into sound.
To comprehend the technical intricacies of ADME and trace back its developmental journey, I have shared the three albums below.
Legacy
The MATLAB synthesizer ADME may have been completed, used, abused, and eventually disregarded. But the music project ADME is far from dead. Only its focus and methods have changed. So far, I produced two more albums, which you can find below. Compared to the first three albums, they may be more conventional, but also easier on the ears—perhaps even pleasant.