The origins of Binary Dust date back to 1993. I’d just finished my first degree in Astrophysics and was studying for a Masters in Computer-Music. By coincidence, the music dept at Glasgow University was directly opposite the Maths & Astronomy building: a short walk across the road into a different world.

At that time I made a very conscious decision to keep my ‘physics brain’ away from my ‘music brain’ as I had an in-built prejudice against them being allowed to occupy the same headspace, and a specific aversion to ‘sonification’ in my own practice (which is interesting to me, but in the same way as a graph, not in the same way as Rach No.2). 

However, it was inevitable that they had to, and at various points along the way, others’ help to encourage (aka ‘insist’) that this happened.

The first time I stumbled into the methods that would define this work it involved a room full of 10 NeXT computers all processing and playing sounds in real time, while I mixed them all in live, via a full rack of effects and analogue kit, onto DAT. 

I was so excited with the outcome, I had to find a phone box (yes, that long ago!) to call Andy and tell him something like “I’ve just discovered the basis of all the music I will write in my life”. ‘Tempest’ was subsequently selected by the ICMC for performance – I believe Richard may have been on the review panel and may have heard echoes of his algorithms.

And so, for three decades (so far) I’ve been weaving astrophysics and music, trying to understand what they might actually have in common, not as metaphor or a literal translation, not just as inspiration, but as something more structural, architectural, looking and listening for patterns.

The questions that drive Binary Dust are long: is there a musical equivalent to the curvature of spacetime? While this might sound like a provocation, I mean it seriously: when you look across the history of music and the history of science, you find parallels and repeating patterns.

As our understanding of the universe has deepened, our language of music has changed with it: from the monophony of the 1400s, through polyphony and harmony, increasing in complexity through the romantic and operatic eras, into the reductionist mathematical compositions of Cage and Glass, and then forward again into the algorithmic and electronic forms we have today. 

I don’t think these are coincidences:  they parallel our cultural evolution, our scientific understanding, industrialisation, and evidence a shared cultural attempt to describe where we are and what we’re ‘inside of’. People have always pulled together whatever tools they can to make sense of the structure of things. There’s a reason Abbott’s Flatland and Gamow’s Mr Tompkins in Wonderland were influential books to read as a child, why Aronofsky’s film, Pi, instantly became one of my favourites when it was released in 1998, and why it made sense to be a Trustee of Longplayer to help think through how ‘a music’ might persist across the dimensions of time, space and culture.

One thing that’s changed is that we now have tools that simply didn’t exist before: electronic music created sounds with no causal link to any physical source and sounds that exist only in digital or recorded form, in a space you cannot enter because it physically doesn’t exist. This is a very ‘recent’ phenomenon in human history. 

At the same time, astrophysics has given us the ability to measure gravitational waves, an understanding of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and observe pulsars spinning thousands of times a second.

Along the way, Andy and I have experimented with sonification, as stepping-stones. Sonifying galaxies so you can hear the structure of their spiral arms, by mapping their radio frequency emissions into sound.  Or taking the Digitized Sky Survey as a source.  Other tools and visualisations have helped better image what an n-dimensional space might look like, and these are all fantastic inputs into the process. Or using quasar spectra from “The Next Generation Atlas of Quasar Spectral Energy Distributions from Radio to X-rays”. 

We’ve started the process of imagining Einstein’s theories of General Relativity as a ‘music of the hypersphere’, and how a Soniverse might exist as its own construct. 

Binary Dust started out as the name of my ‘album’ but it’s now the umbrella term. It is a long-term, highly longitudinal work, is my attempt to work inside these spaces. 

We’ve been building a framework, Acoustic Cosmology, in which the mathematical structures of cosmology and quantum mechanics become compositional tools: again not as ‘analogy’ or ‘sonification’, but as derived from and inspired by actual rules for how sound behaves. 

Its fundamental particle is the sonon (= one wavelength) and is the sonic equivalent of a photon. Sonons can cluster through temporal gravity, where wave-time can curve, and can be processed with ‘physical’ constraints (as defined by mathematics, not by this reality). 

The listener, like the observer in quantum mechanics, is the thing that collapses the uncertainty into something real. After years away from the astronomical research field, some old colleagues were more than a little surprised (as was I) when some of this was presented at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting and White Devil was used in the 50th anniversary celebrations at Jodrell Bank.

Binary Dust creations have been, very gradually, incrementally, performed and presented across five continents from New Mexico to Antarctica, from Hong Kong to Latvia, over 30 years so far.

I’m curious now what language we’ll be using to describe music in the years ahead. 

It is a project without end and, by design, and because life also happens, will take time, space and energy.