 Helo. I don't know if this is in the right place. Can people hear me? If I start to mumble, then just wave. My name's Tim. I'm a 3D artist and product designer. I'm going to spend my half an hour talking about a couple of projects that I've done, working with some data that I managed to wrangle from NASA and doing some kind of arty physical, digital synthesis of it. Before I show you what I made, I wanted to take you on a bit of a journey to show you some of the inspirations behind the process because for me that's always the fun bit. And if all goes to plan, you'll leave here in half an hour's time feeling a combination of sublime relaxation with perhaps a little bit of creeping existential dread. Let's see how it goes. But I do have to do one thing which is a bit of shameless self-cross promotion. This is a project I've been working on for the last two years. It's a game that's coming to market at the end of the year called Beaster Balance. It is a kind of mix of digital and physical and there's sound and it's kind of a co-op board game type thing but you play it with an iPad attached. It's going to be probably in the bar this evening or perhaps I think there's one of the workshops that has games going on. So if you're intrigued about games, come along and play it because we are knee deep in development and we would love to get some hands-on feedback. So that's Beaster Balance. Right. So the project I'm going to tell you about came around because of a problem that I was experiencing that I think is probably going to be quite common in the audience. And that's when you are sitting down to try and concentrate on something and every so often you get distracted by something that breaks your concentration. That was loud. You have lost your focus. So that's where this problem came. I have terrible willpower. So I wanted to see if there was something I could find that would help me to find focus and by focus I am talking about flow states. Flow states if you're not aware of the term, you will definitely have experienced them. Magical moments when you get so involved in a task, so absolutely consumed by it that everything else disappears away from you. You become a Zen master at it. You can see the matrix. I rely on them to do my best work, but I found them becoming harder and harder to reach because of all the distractions and as I said a chronic lack of willpower and it's easy to become overwhelmed. So I started to look at traditional methods of achieving these kind of states. Now perhaps in the past you might turn to something like meditation or prayer or chanting to help gain that kind of clarity and the way these work is they occupy the mind with very simple repeating tasks in order to give our conscious brain a little time to recover, a little respite. Adult colouring books which have become a really big thing over the past few years, they work in the same way, very simple repetitive motions, but they weren't really going to work for me because one, I'm a horrifically dirty atheist and two, I wanted something that would facilitate my creative process. I didn't want to have to create new things through colouring or something like that. So my eyes and my hands are occupied when I work, but my ears, they were kind of up for grabs. So I started looking into music. I'm going to try and talk over this. So, as I said before, I'm not a religious person and the problem with a lot of traditional kind of chanting is that it has spiritual and religious connotations that I wasn't really interested in getting caught up with. Now I don't believe that chanting has the power to heal, for instance, but I do think it can help these long drawn out tones with very little in the way of progression. Very little flourish in the way these passages of music are put together. And I think, again, it's the same thing as things like colouring books and the monkey you saw was making mantras. It's about giving the brain space to explore. So the nice thing about these kind of sounds is the brain can detune a little bit. You're not expecting the next verse, you're not expecting the next lyric. And so you can start to kind of pick apart what you're listening to and hear the microtones, the undulations, the little pitch shifts. And those things are really powerful. So I bought this little guy along. Some of you probably have seen these before. This is called a Buddha machine. It's made by a Chinese French electronic duo called FM3. And I love this. This is one of my favourite things. The reason being, from outward's appearance, it's a tiny little plastic injection moulded box. It takes a couple of batteries, it has two switches. Inside it is a very, very low quality speaker and an equally low quality kind of loop playing circuit board. Now FM3 got the inspiration from these from visiting temples, specifically small temples that didn't have the need or the resources to have a resident monk who would sit in a corner and chant. So what these small temples did is they went and got a tape player, they recorded it and they had it on a loop. And FM3 took that concept and they made some loops for it using their own kind of electronic music. And I'm going to attempt to play it very quickly here. It's probably going to sound quite horrible. Let's see if it works. So similar, let's try this one. Similar kind of structures, very, very microtonal, there's not a great deal of flourish. And if you have that, or at least if I have that sitting in the background when I'm working, it does exactly what I need it to do. And the nice thing about it is it doesn't have any of the religious baggage that comes with that type of music. I wanted to share one more strong inspiration with me for me. This is one of my absolute favourite contemporary artists, a guy called Doug Foster. If you are London based, he currently has something showing at Somerset House, highly recommend you go and see it. He works with projection and very, very low dronal music. So to try and give you an idea of the type of frame of mind I'm talking about, if you will indulge me, what I'd like to do is just crank the volume up a little bit and play maybe a minute of this. And what I do, I'll encourage you to sit back, try to become absorbed into it, sink into your seats until you try, until you start to find those little, little changes, little changes in the sound. Let your lizard brain take over for a minute. And at the very least, if you're not getting on with that, just have a nap, it's fine. Everyone back in the room. So that's the kind of thing I was trying to approach with what I'm about to show you now. So, another sound clip. This is where the project starts for me, so I'm just going to play it and then explain it later. Two little whistles. But before we get to those, I need to give you a little brief astronomy lesson. Okay, so in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager programme. It was Twinkrafts, Voyagers 1 and 2, and they were packed to the gills with camera sensors and antennas. First they went to Jupiter. The slingshotted round Jupiter went off to Saturn. And as they did so, they opened up their antenna arrays and started to transmit a wealth of information back to Earth. Whilst they went round Jupiter, they discovered that there were active volcanoes on the moon of Io. They started to chart the cloud formations on Jupiter. And they sent back the first ever colour images of Saturn's rings. And the Voyager 1 was directed straight off into space, and Voyager 2 went on to Neptune and Uranus and remained still the only craft ever to do so. And then on August 25th, 2012, Voyager 1 left the heliosphere. The heliosphere is the vast magnetic sphere created by the solar winds that contains our solar system. And the boundary of the sphere acts as a kind of shield. It protects us from all the cosmic rays that are bombarded from outer space, interstellar space. They're pretty dangerous, those things. So Voyager 1 became the first man-made object ever to leave the solar system. To give that context, we're talking 18 billion kilometres from the sun. Earth is 150 million kilometres, so it's a pretty far way away. And the really amazing thing is it's still going. They're both still going. This was captured from NASA's website yesterday, so they're a little further away now than they were then. And the really sad thing is that in about ten years' time, both of their plutanium power sources are going to run out and then they'll die, and that's sad. But then their journeys are still going to continue because they're travelling at 100,000 kilometres a minute, I think, or maybe a second, I can't remember. So eventually, in 40,000 years' time, Voyager 1 is going to reach the nearest star to it. That makes me feel very small. When NASA had no real idea of when Voyager was going to leave the heliosphere, but they suspected they'd see a change in the type of data that was being sent back, and that's what you're listening to. This is vibrations in plasma caused by a huge jump in the number of protons suddenly present when Voyager left the heliosphere. This is the sound of interstellar space, and it kind of hooked me quite bad. So I wanted to see what other information was out there, and if you'll excuse the disgusting segue, I went from listening to sounds that came from the void to shouting out to the void. Twitter, obviously. And that kind of started the journey. So from that tweet, I got talking to Dr Anthony Allen at the Imperial College London Space and Atmospheric Physics Department, from there to Lisa Ballard of SETI, and bizarrely from there to Beth Bec, who is the programme manager of open innovation at NASA, from one tweet. And then I ended up talking to this gentleman, and this is Professor Bill Curth of the Radio and Plasma Wave Group Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Iowa. And that particular group has provided radio and plasma wave receivers for more than 20 NASA missions, including Cassini and Galileo, and Voyagers 1 and 2. This was the guy who built the antenna that captured the information that I was interested in. And I sent him just a ridiculous email saying I wanted to do some art. And he was really nice. And so he directed me to a marvellous repository of plasma and electromagnetic vibration recordings that have been captured with radio waves and then synthesised into sound. So this one here is from Jupiter. Jolvian Chorus. What you're listening to there is that was generated in Jupiter's radiation belts. And you're hearing the sound of electrons spiling along around these radiation belts. And sometimes they fall out of orbit and they hit the ionosphere like shooting stars. And that creates that whistle. So you're hearing electrons going out of, going into Jupiter's atmosphere. And as I said, they're captured as radio waves, so then you can just play them through a speaker and it comes out with sound. So all Professor Kerth did was clean up, so get rid of some of the low frequency noise and slow them down by a factor of four to make them slightly easier to listen to. So if this was in real time, it would be kind of like birds chirping, I guess. But otherwise they're untouched. So I kind of knew I wanted to do something with this, to tear them apart and see if they contained any of the kind of tones and effects that I was listening to. I wanted to capture. So I bought on my friend Dougie. He's a sound designer for games. And he took the raw MP3s. I think there's sound on this one. Cool. So he took the raw MP3s and he started to play with them. He cleaned them up. He slowed them down. He added a touch of reverb every now and again to see if he could find those long monotonal tones. And whilst it's true that anything that you slow down sufficiently is going to sound epic, take the infamous 800% slower Justin Bieber song You Smile, which is what you're listening to now, by the way. The difference that we had, we thought anyway, is we were going to have things that sounded epic and they actually came from actual space. So it was a compromise. So whilst Dougie was playing with the sound, I started to look at the physical forms. I asked him to pull off some of the waveforms that he was working with to see if I could do anything that would loop it back to where the inspiration came from. He started to give me waveforms and I started to extrapolate 3D forms from them. So what you're looking at here is 10 seconds of audio in each wave, and then there's 10 seconds of time passing between each wave. So that there is 80 seconds of the sound of a particular event on Jupiter. I think this one was... In fact, I can't remember, so I'm not going to make it up. And then they're lofted to create these wonderful undulating topographic kind of alien landscapes. And the nice thing is that each one is different. And then I built the shape around a really cheap MP3 player. The absolute bare minimum that would be needed to hear the sounds through headphones. Gave it some power buttons and a power switch, and then started to 3D print till there was no tomorrow. And came out of it with these four tiny little personal music players. Each one had a 20-minute composition on it with a unique shape to match. And we showed them in a few galleries that purposely were set out to allow people to sit down and get lost in them. And I think for maybe 30 seconds I'll play... This one is from Saturn before I finish off by telling you about the next thing I've done. So just crank it up again. Thank you. Yeah, the sound system isn't quite right for that. But I promise you there's more going on there than just bass. I think the next one is going to make more sense. So one final thing, seven minutes left. This is the Curiosity landing site on Mars. Specifically it's called the Gale Crater. It's 200 kilometres across, and that central point is three miles high. This is a 3D model that was captured by NASA and is put online. They have a fantastic open resource of data, and specifically 3D models that they've put out of all their satellites, as well as some topological information like this. You can download it, do whatever you want with it. So looking at this I was definitely getting a kind of Han Solo 2001 vibe, so I thought let's make a massive monolith. Two days of cutting time. Two days of cutting time gave us a two-metre tall panel, which kind of looked more like a Warhammer table than anything else. The good thing about it is painted black and it becomes art. So that was it standing in our workshop. Looking quite dramatic. And then we worked in reverse with the sound this time. So I took that 3D form and cut it into 200 sections, 200 waveforms, which I did manually because I'm not a coder, so there's any software people, I'm sorry for the inefficiency there. And then unbelievably we were asked by the, I was asked by the Tate Britain to put it in there, so they gave us a little room. This is the only picture I could get of it. And it sat in the corner with a little bit of dramatic lighting. And that horizontal line, that moved in time with the music. So when you looked at it obliquely you could see the waveform as it moved. So I've got a little bit of the audio from this one. Let's see if it's a little more successful and then that'll be me done.