 Welcome to stage C everybody, EMF camp, whoo! Yeah, that surprised you. Right, we have a great talk coming up now. We have Leon and Connor talking about making music from gravity waves and the chromatouch dome, except that there seems to be some technical difficulties happening. Okay, so I'm now going to have to waffle for a bit. Yeah, I think that's good. I'm going to start by introducing us. So I'm Leon Trimble, a digital artist from Birmingham, currently based at the pervasive media studio in Bristol and the Steamhouse in Digbuff in Birmingham. And I've run the dome, which is just about 100 meters that way. So we've been doing some modular synthesizer visuals and music jams all day. And into the wee hours every night to come and see us tonight. I think we're on until midnight. So I have been hacking lots of devices and gaming technology and stuff for years to make visuals and music. And it's kind of a convoluted story. But we're here to talk about the gravity synth day, which is a laser interferometer. Which is an instrument for detecting vibrations. And on a massive scale, they detect gravitational waves. And Connor's going to give you a slideshow presentation of how the University of Birmingham and the LIGO team at MIT have been detecting gravitational waves over the past few years. And then I'll go on to describe the instrument we've made with the synthesizer and how that makes crazy noises we can take out and perform with. So the performances in the dome have been put on by a group of different friends. We got asked by EMF to bring the dome after being recommended by the live code musicians who were here last year, the ALGO rave guys. Ironically, they've got their own festival happening this weekend in Leeds, so none of them could come and perform. So that was a real shame. I'll let Connor take over. Yeah, hi everyone. So just like Leon said, I'm Connor Gettins. I'm a PhD student at the University of Birmingham working on gravity. And I'm going to introduce the science behind the gravity synth. So I'll just give you an introduction to it. It kind of started as a collaboration between our research group in Birmingham and with Leon. And the idea was to use science to produce a synthesizer, and most specifically using an interferometer to generate sound. And let's see if hopefully this will work. I can't hear that. No sound, but so that sounds like I'm playing about with it in a test minute. But ultimately all this says is we're using interferometer to generate waves, which can then be manipulated just like any synthesizer. This was the early days in the lab underneath the physics building at the University of Birmingham. And this was an early model of the synth. We've got a bigger and better model on show in the dome. Yeah, so sorry. No sound to the videos. But yeah, like Leon said, that's when we're playing about with it in the lab. So moving on to the science, why is gravity important? Well, up until three years ago, everything we saw in the universe, everything we observed was from light, things that admit and scatter light. So electromagnetic radiation. But the matter which manipulates light only makes up about five, six percent of the whole universe. So we're actually blind to the majority of things out there, specifically dark energy and dark matter. We can't see a thing with that. So while we get lovely images like this from telescopes from electromagnetic radiation, this is a century say, we're actually missing a lot of stuff out there. So how do we get, how can we look at the things that doesn't give out light, that doesn't reflect and diffract light? Well, rather than looking at the universe, we can try and listen to the universe. And this is where gravity comes in. So just a bit of background in gravity. So our idea of gravity was first formally put down by Galileo. He did a lot of experiments, dropping things from towers, rolling things down inclines. And he found that under the influence of gravity, everything falls, should fall at the same acceleration, the acceleration due to local gravity. So if you drop a feather and a hammer and a vacuum, they should fall the exact same rate. So you can't hear it, but this was on the Apollo 15 mission where they actually tested this experiment on the moon. They dropped a feather and a hammer. And you'll see in a second that they do indeed fall at the same rate. Now, of course, we have done these experiments on there, far more precisely than just someone dropping them by hand. And it is indeed true, Galileo was right, things do just fall at the same rate under gravity. The reason we don't see this, if you drop a feather and a hammer right now, of course the feather would drop much more slowly. That's because aerodynamic drag and air resistance. If you take that away, they do fall at the same rate. And there you go. And then after Galileo Newton came about and he formulated gravity into, you know, actual equations that we can use to manipulate. And these equations can predict the motions of the stars and the majority of the planets, but it does break, these equations do break down. They can't predict, they can't predict precisely the orbit of Mercury. And action at a distance as well assumes that the influence of gravity is everywhere. The information travels faster than speed of light, which is of course impossible. So in the presence of strong gravitational fields, Newton's theory breaks down. So then we get on to general relativity. So after Newton, we get Einstein. In 1915, 1916, he publicized his theory of general relativity. And while I'm thinking of it being like distinct formal force in action at a distance, he said, okay, well, you know, matter curves space-time. And since curvature space-time, that's what gives you gravity. So this little floating diagram here, you can imagine it's been a uniform cuboid. If you put a star at the center, space-time curves in towards it. And that's what gravity is. It's the curvature space-time. And we get a lot of interesting things predicted from general relativity. It predicts the existence of black holes and gravitational waves. And other things as well like time dilation. It also allows us to accurately predict the difference between reference frames. So without general relativity, you wouldn't have a system of satellites around there. Global communications would not be possible without theory of general relativity. So the thing that we're interested in is gravitational waves. And these are, if gravity is the influence of the curvature space-time, gravitational waves are ripples in the space-time. And they're caused by any mass that accelerates, any asymmetric mass which accelerates. But of course, everyday objects, including ourselves, the gravitational waves we produce are unimaginably small, even by scientific standards. We have to look at the waves emitted from the largest objects in the universe, interacting in some of the most violent processes you can imagine. So in general, gravitational waves are quite hard to measure. And to give you an idea of how a gravitational wave influences space-time, it's unlike sound waves, which are long and sugar-drill. Gravitational waves are transverse. So if you can imagine this little map here, I'll explain what the shape is in a minute. But if you can imagine, a gravitational wave passing either into or directly out of the screen affects space-time like this, so it stretches and squeezes space-time. Now of course, it's not as drastic effect as this, unfortunately, it'd be much easier to measure if it was. So that's what a gravitational wave does. It stretches and squeezes space-time in orthogonal directions to the way it travels. And this L-shape here, you've seen the map. This is one of the interfermers at LIGO. So I'll explain about that in a second. But yeah, so this L-shape is a mechosome interfermer. And how it works is it uses a laser light of a single frequency and the laser lights show on a mirror, a beam splitter, which specifically 50-50 and directs it towards two mirrors. And as it does, you see this wave pattern splitting off. It goes to the mirrors and comes back. And when it comes back to the mirror, it's directed towards a photodiod. Now these waves, we can interfere with each other, either constructively or deconstructively, depending if they're in phase or not. And what determines the phase is the relative length of these two arms. If they're the exact same length, you'll get constructive interference. If it's slightly off, you'll get deconstructive interference. And as the gravitational wave passes through, it stretches and squeezes space-time. And we get the relative change in length of these arms. So that's how you get these bright and dark patterns. As the gravitational wave passes through, you'll see a pattern of light and dark. So if the output of this photodiod would look like a sinusoid. And from a scientific point of view, why do you want to do this? Well, like I said earlier, it's the only way to directly observe things like black holes and also neutron stars. And these are some artistic interpretations. But we've made a few detections now over the past few years. Most recent one was quite interesting. It was the first detection of neutron stars colliding. And we had the first direct proof that heavy elements like gold are made in these interactions before that was only just theory. But now we know all the heavy elements on earth, gold, anything like that, they're all made by colliding neutron stars. And so just before I go on to back to the sound of gravitational waves in the gravity sense, I'll just show you a little cool clip. So this is a simulation of the very first detection, which was two black holes inspiring and eventually the collided. And this inspired it would have been going on for millions of years, but the gravitational waves were only strong enough that it wouldn't really caught the last minute or so at the end of this process. So I'll just play this little simulation. So here we see two black holes inspiring around one another. The sort of color pattern is the gravitational waves rippling off. And along the bottom, this would be the signal at the output of the interferometer. Now bear in mind, these black holes were over 10 times the mass of the sun. And at this point, they would be moving more than half the speed of light. So this was an incredibly violent process. You wouldn't want to be anywhere near here right now. So then they collide and then you see the ring down at the end. So you see these ripples spreading out. That's distortions in space time, the gravitational waves from this event. And this was interesting. It was the first direct detection of black holes. It was also the first, like I said, the first gravitational wave. So we kind of ticked off a lot of boxes there about things we did for the first time. So I'll just move on finally to the sound of gravitational waves. Like I said, they're just like sound waves. And as such, we can manipulate them to produce such that we can actually hear them. Now the interesting thing at LIGO is that the frequency of these gravitational waves, they're actually in the audible region. You could hear these in the right situations. Of course, their amplitude is so small. I mean, you would never actually hear it with your own ears. But all we need to do is turn up the volume. And you hear it. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any sound for this video. But towards the end, as they collide, you hear a little chirp sound. Unfortunately, I can't play it. Anyway, it'd be a long sort of drone. And then all of a sudden, towards the end, right here, it'd be a very loud chirp as the I can play that afterwards. I can do a YouTube of that. Yeah, we've got more videos after. Anyway, like I said, gravitational waves are just like sound waves. They're transverse rather than longitudinal. So when I say sound waves are longitudinal, as they travel along, they adiabatically compress and stretch the air in the direction they travel. But gravitational waves are just the same. They have a frequency, which gives us a pitch. And from the output of an interferometer, they have a definite shape, which gives us a tone that shall feel the sound. And all we need to do is take the output from a photo diode from this meccal sound interferometer, and then hook up to a synthesizer. And there you go. So I'll leave it there. And just before I bring back Leon back in, he'll actually show you some cool videos about how this actually sounds. But I'll just finish by saying, feel free to check out our group website. We've got all information, gravitational waves, and the stuff I've done with Leon. And a lot of cool outreach stuff, including apps and games as well. So yeah, thanks. All right. So I attended, I was at Birmingham Open Media studio for a while. And I had, there was a kind of impact for science engagement kind of meeting that happened. And I sat next to one of the other researchers from the Gravitational Wave Department called Hannah Middleton. And I told her I was doing audiovisual art. And she said, when black holes collide, they make chirp sounds. And I was like, wow, my mind is blown. And we just started hanging out. And we didn't even tell the people who had organized the engagement kind of seminar. So probably three months later, we were just sort of, I was going to the lab and Chanxie's gone and seen what they were doing. And we've become really good friends, actually. Hannah's now moved to Australia. I did Shambhala Festival last week with Joan. We had Aaron Jones, who's helped build a lot of stuff along with Connor in the lab. And Connor is here for this event. And so we're having loads of fun sort of hanging out. And I started building a modular synthesizer to make some noise with it. And what I was going to do originally was try and get the interferometer to modulate the synthesizer. But what it turned out was that, like he says, the sort of vibrations are in the audio kind of region. So I ended up using the modular synthesizer and the low frequency oscillator to modulate that and use that as the voice. And it's become this amazing voice. We've got it over there. We're just tinkering with it. So there you go. Like the whole of the millions of years of gravitational black holes colliding at that point makes a chirp that quick. But rather than use the sounds, the digital samples of that, a lot of kind of artists use digital data after the fact for making art and sonifying data from CERN and what have you. I really wanted to use it as an instrument. I wanted the live performance because everything I do is live because I like the chaos that that kind of entails. And this is the chaos we've got in the dome. Everybody's usually playing live all day and into the evening. So there's a certain chaos, but out of that comes some real order. So I wanted to use the actual interferometer as this instrument. So we've done a few performances now. The next of which is actually at Newton's house. We'll sort of manner whether the apple tree or the reported apple tree. There are different stories as to whether or not there was really an apple. But the real apple tree from the real story, it really is a story, is there. So we'll be playing there in a couple of weeks. It's really exciting. So this was at the Future Sessions in Manchester, the Future Everything Festival. And Connor and Aaron came and talked to that. And my girlfriend has been brought into the project. She's a PhD student in digital animation at Plymouth University, the IDAT Collective. And so she's got gravitational, not gravitational wave data. She's got gravitational wave data and colliding neutron star kind of data. She's kind of animated. So we've got this lovely kind of stuff. And these lovely spang noises that come along are the actual voice of the interferometer. They're coming. There, that's the interferometer. So I'll keep that playing. I'll turn the volume down a little bit. So there's a lot of information flying around the system. There's the visuals that get OSC via a wireless router built into the modular. And I'm hitting the Mickelson interferometer and it's a local one. Gravitational waves won't really register on this one. But I'm also sending like LFO kick drum patterns through a solenoid that is attached to the interferometer that sends out the patterns later on. So when the beats come in, and this video is incomplete, it's not the whole set. And we've got that going later in the dome if you want to come and look. And so it all kind of, it's a living breathing system. And then what the plan is, and we almost did it at the Lunar Festival in the Journey to Neutopia. But they put us on too early to do the visuals. So we're putting the visuals in the 360 degree space. So you're really in the kind of planetarium feel of a kind of performance. And I think we're built wrong. We're built as just talking about the Chroma Touch dome here. So we've got the gravity set. The plans for the dome next are to put this into 360 degrees and to take it on tour next year. And the tour is going to go around the science festivals. It's going to do a bit of rural touring to places with village greens. We can put the dome up and all the kind of art centres that are on campus around the place. And there's going to be a whole programme of people using science and research for live performance. People like Graham Dunning. I need some mechanical techno. There we go, a bit of that. Here we go, he comes up. So he's gone viral. This amazing thing where he builds a whole system of mechanical objects that are driven by turntables and hacked records. So he uses metal contacts here to create some lovely stuff. Where do we go? So yeah. And he gets this lovely state where the whole thing is driven just by the kinetics of the turntable. I've also been talking to Vicky Clark who's got a lovely kind of materiality blog about all the stuff you can do with kind of physics and materials. And I'll go via that one. Okay. He's got a link to it. It's just a thing. So basically we've got a synth running later and everybody's plugged in to everybody else so we'll be showing that. And we'll be, here we go, materiality. Also been talking to Professor Alice Roberts about turning the diamond to a big heart. So that's where we're going to go with everything. I think we're kind of out of time. Are there any questions? Yeah, five minutes questions. Any questions? Can't see any hand. Oh, there we go. Yeah, sorry, I may have missed it. But did you say anything about the interferometer itself? How big is it? What is it made of? Can I make one? Can I play one? We've got one there. You can come see. Did you make it? It was made in the labs with Conor and Aaron and it's a desktop interferometer about so big and it's like a laser pen size laser in it with a small beam splitter and an optic diode that picks that up and then we amplify that into a series of modular kind of mixer bits that one we can send the solenoid to vibrate it and to really back into a resonator so that we can then give it melody because you can give a volt per octave pattern of notes in key to the resonated sound from that. So you can actually then give it a melody kind of pattern as well. And then that goes into a lovely kind of granular kind of synthesizer that then sort of spangles it about and spreads it across the stereo field. So it actually becomes a synthesizer rather than just a percussion instrument, but it does do these lovely percussion sounds and it's all flight cases and very portable. Yeah, any more for any more. Sorry, just to add on to that and the technical side of it. Yeah, the one we have over in the tent which you can come have a look at that is quite professionally done. I mean it'd be quite difficult to make that but Birmingham we are working on a way to get a sort of more general sort of easily assembled one that's fairly cheap because for the one through there the mirrors to get really good sounds and visual quality you really need a quick sense of mirrors. A proper bean splitter will be a few grand but of course that's if you want like really research grade. We are working on having little almost like Lego play type builds where you get just like cheap mirrors and a little laser pen you actually build up with Lego. But I mean if you look on the website you'll see information about that. But yeah the one through the one we've got through there like Eileen said it's quite small tabletop the arm length is about 15, 10, 15 centimetres. For those of you who don't know the ones that detected gravitational waves at Lego they're four kilometre arm lengths so they're a bit more difficult to make. Oh yeah well yeah so the tunnels themselves are four kilometres but the power's recycled so I think they believe the total path length of the weight is about 16 kilometres. Yeah so they're really they're in vacuums as well and they're suspended by glass wires so that there's no electrons that will vibrate them and it becomes so small a measurement that it's almost quantum mechanics because it's like almost imperceptible. This is why there are two facilities it's at Hanford and Livingston in different states so they've both got to go off for it to work and there's now Virgo in Italy so they are expanding. Yeah okay everybody big round of applause for Leon and Connor. Thank you very much thank you just a little reminder that EMF is entirely run by volunteers so if you're having a nice time at the festival please consider donating some of your time back to helping things run. I think we especially need people to do basically everything this afternoon but yeah thank you and another round of applause for these guys.