The ICAD concerts presents artistic works with a strong relation to data, including data sonifications and data-inspired performances.
At ICAD, due to the two different time zones, we will have two separate Concerts:
Sonification Concert (Europe)
Wednesday, 2026-07-29, 20:00 CEST, (DE & ES hubs, locations: Bielefeld: CITEC 1.024, Barcelona: (add location))
Concert Program
20:00 (CEST) Opening (Concert Co-Chairs: Adrian Garcia Riber and David Johnson)
20:03 Drawing of a Tree (Phyllotaxis of Pure Feeling II).
Jorge Boehringer (from ES hub, 15 min)
This piece of electronic music is based on sonic models of pine growth developed by the author. It is part of a body of works derived from natural forms to be tested and refined by presenting them within a variety of listening conditions. Each piece in this ongoing series varies from others as a consequence of its internal generative structures. Each performance is a version, and each version like a picture (or a tree), whose nature is perhaps refined and clarified upon iteration, but never perfected.
20:18 Textile Echoes.
Ruben Garcia-Benito (from ES hub, 5 min)
Textile Echoes is a short electroacoustic composition built from recordings of everyday textile interactions in a domestic setting. The spatial arrangement of clothespins on a folding metal clothes-line inspired a rhythmic cell that structures the piece. The work is conceived as a playful homage to musique concrète, inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s exploration of musical structures emerging from recorded objects. Recorded sounds, including fabric friction, metallic buttons, zippers, and a spoken voice, were processed to create an immersive, echoing texture. While not a conventional sonification, the composition is informed by a data-driven mindset, translating visual and spatial patterns into temporal and sonic structures. Lasting less than three minutes, it reflects the ephemeral nature of the gestures it portrays and explores the transformation of mundane sounds into resonant, abstract textures. The accompanying video, titled Patchworlds, offers a visual extension of the piece, presenting a speculative textile environment that translates its textural and temporal processes into an evolving planetary landscape.
20:23 Rotationality #1 and Rotationality #2
Joseph Baader, Lukas Buhtz, Rachel Burnhauser, Manuel Eguia, Sebastian Fecke, Jia Liu, David Hanraths, Julian Rohrhuber, Dennis Scheiba, Marcus Schmickler, Matthias Schneiderbanger, Shuoxin Tan (from DE hub, 8 min + 8 min)
There is a minute difference between the same and the similar. Rotation embodies this difference in a particularly compact way: we always return to the same, but, often, not quite the same. Related to repetion, it is other than that. Rotation is also an interesting methodological topic, since it occupies an intermediate position between the sonification of data of rotational processes on the one hand, and the application of rotations to data for generating oscillations and different auditory perspectives. The epistemic media research group is an open collective of people persuing the development of research methods independently of the distinctions between art and science. Many participants study or have studied Epistemic Media within the Master’s program Klang und Realität at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, and others have joined our communal efforts. Two pieces are presented, as a part of the full installation Rotationality shown the next morning in the installations session (DE hub)
20:39 Ljómi – Sonification of the Northern Lights.
Andy Deighton (from ES hub, 10 min)
Ljómi – Sonification of the Northern Lights is a 7-minute live electronic music performance and real-time aurora-to-MIDI system that asks whether the Northern Lights can be approached not only as image, spectacle, or scientific data, but as a dynamic musical partner. Using prerecorded aurora footage or live camera input, the system treats each frame as a changing field of visual activity. It detects common auroral colours – green, pink, and purple – in HSV space and assigns each to an independent MIDI channel. For each colour region, Ljómi measures intensity, frame coverage, average brightness, internal gradients, directional motion, and wave coherence, translating these features into MIDI notes and continuous controller data that shape harmony, timbre, filtering, and spatialisation.
Rather than pursuing literal one-to-one conversion, the project employs a structured mapping strategy designed to preserve the felt qualities of auroral behaviour: drift, suspension, luminosity, instability, and sudden reorganisation. Harmonic material is constrained by scale frameworks and chord mappings so that variations in brightness and area produce evolving harmonic fields rather than arbitrary event streams. In this way, the aurora functions simultaneously as dataset and performer, while composition emerges through negotiation between environmental motion, analytical model, and artistic mapping decisions.
Presented with projected aurora video recorded in Alaska by “aurora chaser” Vincent Ledvina and live manipulation of system parameters via external MIDI controllers, Ljómi contributes to ICAD as both artwork and sonification method. By using MIDI as an explicitly interpretive symbolic layer, it makes light playable within existing musical ecosystems and invites audiences to hear the Northern Lights as a source of harmonic, dynamic, and textural form.
20:49 Short Break (10 min)
20:59 Aladin Miniatures. Making Music with the Virtual Observatory.
Adrian Garcia Riber (from ES hub, 7 min)
Aladin Miniatures is a sky region-driven stereo fixed media composition for piano and strings. The piece has been created using the SoniAladin application, developed in the context of the Open Science initiative of the Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO) project. SoniAladin allows the capture of images from Aladin Sky Atlas, and explores them from top to bottom. At each exploration step, the represented bright objects are mapped to the equivalent position note of a piano keyboard (with the lowest notes corresponding to the bright objects on the left, and the highest notes corresponding to the bright objects on the right). The monochromatic apparent luminance of each bright object is mapped to the intensity of each note. Piano sounds correspond to luminances higher than 50 (in a scale of 128 steps), while string sounds correspond to luminances between 15 and 50. SoniAladin project aims to improve accessibility in Aladin Sky Atlas as well as to foster interest and engagement in science and astronomy through sound and music.
21:07 On standby.
Loud Numbers (presented by Duncan Geere from DE hub, 18 min)
On Standby makes the invisible energy of our sleeping households audible. The piece draws on data collected by seven volunteers in Malmö, Sweden, each of whom used a smart plug to record a domestic device — a fridge, a freezer, a phone charger, a boiler, a television — through the night of 25th August 2024. Every time a device consumes half a watt-hour, roughly enough to heat a teaspoon of water to boiling, a custom-synthesised earcon sounds, so busier devices are heard more often and the texture of the night shifts hour by hour. This 15-minute live performance distils the full 10-hour, 40-minute work into a concentrated journey through the night’s most wakeful passages, weaving eight sonification layers together with spoken-word recollections from the volunteers and a poem, heard in full, by Malmö poet Anna Arvidsdotter.
21:25 Physicians and Bodily Sounds.
İdil Kocabozdoğan (from DE hub, 18 min)
This works draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside the emergency department of Taksim Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul. Over the course of her research, Idil Kocabozdoğan recorded the acoustic environment of the department and spoke at length with practicing physicians about how they listen, exploring how clinical decisions take shape through sound, amid the layered noise of machines, bodies, and urgency. Her live electroacoustic composition weaves field recordings, machine signals, and fragments of physiological rhythm into a piece that preserves the texture of that environment rather than abstracting it away. The work asks how medical knowledge is held in the ear, and what it means to interpret bodily signals under pressure.
21:43 end of concert
Sonification Concert (US)
Wednesday, 2026-07-29, 16:00 EDT, (US hubs)
Concert Program
Sofía Matus Cancino: Movements of a Remnant
Movements of a Remnant is a visual music work created with structural sequences derived from the artist’s medical file, consisting of fetal monitoring during pregnancy and childbirth, used as the data source driving the audiovisual interaction.
Ben Dexter Cooley, Michael Arnold and Jonathan St. Onge: The Sounds of Shifting Attention
Wikipedia is one of the greatest collections of shared human knowledge on the internet. This sonification performance will explore this data for every day of 2025, capturing large shifts in attention and sentiment through sound. University of Vermont, researchers have created a new suite of tools that apply computational linguistic methods to better understand how collective attention shifts on Wikipedia over time. After collecting over a year’s worth of data, I wanted to compose a piece that recounts the significant events and changes that were captured through either new Wikipedia pages or edits to existing pages. These sentiment scores for each day will be performed live on aThese sentiment scores for each day will be performed live on a steel guitar.
Jonas Braasch and Joshua Braasch: Binaural America for Immersive Media and Live Ensemble
Across America examines the sound relationships between urban and rural areas, while exploring Jens Blauert’s concept of Spatial Understanding and Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Philosophy. The piece is a series of segments of a larger project that emerged from an audiovisually documented road trip by train and car from San Francisco to New York City in the Summer of 2023.
Alexandria Smith and Kyle Smith: “all because we can” for trumpet, interactive visuals, and data sonification
“all because we can” is a reflection on the rapid investment into and construction of data centers since the AI boom that began in the late 2010s. The piece features a steady counterpoint of data sonification that superimposes the number of data center facilities that have been active, under construction, and announced from 2000, projecting to 2048, alongside their total power capacity from those years.