Last year I wrote about taking a waterproof iPod and headphones into a sensory deprivation chamber. I chose Biosphere’s album Autour de la Lune. It was a fascinating experiment. Borderline hallucinogenic and deeply relaxing, the total sensory focus on the ultra-minimal tones of Autour de la Lune was the closest I had ever come to being completely lost in sound. After that session I started wondering how linked my own body rhythms had become to the music during the hour of sensory focus.

Well, fast forward almost a year. A few weeks ago I went back to the tanks armed with a heartrate monitor in addition to the waterproof iPod. In I went, on came the album, and the simple EKG started logging.

Click for a full version of the heartrate/waveform comparison

The superimposed waveform on the heartrate graph is an example of info design awful enough to make Edward Tufte flatline. No, I’m not implying that the sonic peaks and valleys of the music corresponded with spikes (no valleys, thank goodness!) of my heartrate. Obviously the heartbeats per minute units have no relavance to the waveform heights. However, the time axis is in synch. So, you can see what my heartrate was at any moment in the music (song titles in bold black at top).

What to make of it? First the outliers at either end can be discarded as they are my elevated heart rate from entering and leaving the isolation tank. (It ain’t easy with all that gear and warm, hypersalty water sloshing around your nude body.) The first thirteen minutes are somewhat erratic as I’d expect from the acclimation phase. You bump the sides and basically spend a bit of time just calming down. Still, the music during this phase was somewhat erratic too. There’s not enough data to correlate my heartrate with the music, of course, but both do even out around minute fourteen. The end of the first song, Translation, is a complex, consistent drone and it is right at this point that my heartrate starts to level off. During Rotation, a “spikier” collection of tones, my heart rate became more variable again. The most interesting phase is next with the song Modifié. This is one of the subtlest tracks on the album and here my heartrate drops to its lowest point of the whole session. This is the hypnagogic state, the time when you can’t tell if you are asleep or awake, dreaming or thinking — the reason you’re in the chamber to begin with. From there, the heartrate warbles a bit (during Vibratoire, appropriately) and then begins a steady clim back up during Déviation.

Autour de la Lune (“Around the Moon”) is a concept album/tone poem heavily influenced by Jules Vernes’ novel of the same name. The novel, one of the earliest examples of science fiction, is a continuation of the story of a mission to the moon from his first lunar novel “From the Earth to the Moon“. I probably won’t get any closer to the actual surface of the moon than Verne did, but then again in the sensory deprivation tank I was strapped up with medical telemetry all astronaut-like, floating in a capsule of total isolation on my way to a place far away. My trip around the moon.

A word of warning. Both times I’ve done this I’ve had some pressure issues in my head and ringing in my ears for a few days afterward. I am not sure if it is due to the insert headphones, the low droning of the music, the saltwater, or a combination of all these factors. But it is annoying. The perils of spaceflight.

See also My Beating Blog, an interesting experiment where each post is accompanied by correspoding heartrate data.

The concept of the mashup is all the rage these days. The mixability of online apps and services to create something fundamentally new is in part what makes Web 2.0 so appealing. (Here’s a great matrix of web apps and how’s they’ve been mixed with others.) Plotting crime stats on your neighborhood map (Chicagocrime.org), finding out what music acts are upcoming based on your recently played song list (Upcomingscrobbler), viewing photos relavent to your current location (WhereAmI.At?) — all are yokings-together of discrete applications to create something brand new.

The mashup as a musical genre is similarly in vogue right now, maybe more so. If the classic remix is a song dressed up in a new clothes then the musical mashup is a conjoined twin strutting around in a single, seamless overcoat. Mashes from artists like 2 Many DJ’s, DJ Z-Trip, DJ BC, The Kleptones, and Mike Relm demonstrate that when two or more songs are woven together the result is usually more than a bunch of shared downbeats. For example, where DJ’s have traditionally relied on beat matching to pair songs, often mashups choose source material based on thematic similarity. The songs in the mash are like conversants in a dialogue, talking about the same thing. Soulwax does this superbly. Of course, the beats have to match too, but that’s a lot harder to do when you also have to match what they are about.

Both forms of mashing are of course technology-driven. Web app mashups owe their existence to open API’s and standards while musical mashes have proliferated because of the ease of use and ubiquity of digital editing software (and standard audio file formats).
Recently I was listening to an 80’s format streaming radio station and a Beatles medley came on. This isn’t the 80’s, I thought, until I realized that this was one of the early 80’s products of Stars on 45, the pop act that recreated popular music set to a unifying beat. I loved this when I was younger. Stars on 45 created medleys of the BeeGees, famous TV tunes, Motown, and other generic categories. By today’s mashup standards it seems amazingly simple, but what I didn’t know is that Stars on 45 hired sound-alike studio musicians to carefully recreate the original songs — no sample restrictions there, though in truth they were ripping off much more of the originals than today’s quick-sample artists do, but I digress.

Instead of integrating the actual recordings to create something new, Stars on 45 recreated the originals with total faithfulness, a move which gave them the flexibility that today’s technology does. In a way it reminds me of early legacy technology integration projects with all manner of cryptic conversion and middleware transmogrification of data just to get a few apps to talk to each other. The end-user might not know the path the data took to get to him, but to someone who could peer under the hood the process was needlessly byzantine.

And this is where my powers of analogy exhaust themselves.