Tag: acoustic jurisprudence

Josie Long’s Gambit on chess aired on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon. Not being a chess fanatic, I was only half listening. However, the second half of the programme grabbed my attention when it explored whether a beautiful game of chess could be turned into beautiful music. The composer Erland Cooper explored the sounds you can get from a chess board and pieces, and then set about combining these – with the aid of a computer, bass drum and glockenspiel – into an acoustic representation of a game of chess. You can hear the results in the programme. All of a sudden, the description of the game of chess being played in real time came to life. It had colour, excitement, and layers upon layers of musical description.

While this may not have been the highlight of everyone’s Sunday afternoon, for me this demonstrated the possibilities of describing phenomena acoustically. In fact, it was a masterclass in the potential of musical representations.

What if we use techniques like this to describe economic and legal phenomena? How could we describe economic and legal phenomena? From the example here, the possibilities are endless but also hugely exciting and informative.

I have recently been exploring these possibilities using basic multitrack software to “acoustically imagine” econo-socio-legal interactions. Multitrack recording allows for layering of sounds, in the same way that interactions throughout society form layer upon layer as we zoom out and take a macro look. Early renditions have taken one note to represent one interaction between two actors. However, what if we use an interval like a minor third to represent power relations in an interaction? A falling minor third might represent a detrimental power relationship, while a rising minor third might indicate a positive power relationship. Could an unstable interval, such as a fourth or seventh, indicate unease in an interaction? Stay tuned (no pun intended) for updates about acoustic representations of economic and legal phenomena.