Singing in the Wires

Singing in the Wires was one of my favourite pieces in my PhD portfolio and one of the first I experimented with bringing to a website. I wanted to hear it again, and it seemed like a relatively straightforward piece to bring across: a single data source and a relatively simple audio engine. It seemed a good place to start.

The most remarkable thing about Singing in the Wires is how I came across the data in the first place. A note in my diaries says that I was praising the fact that the OpenSky dataset existed and looking for something similar for trains. That search led me through various forms of large-scale infrastructure and somehow, eventually, to National Grid data in the form of the Gridwatch website. The "operating frequency" immediately caught my eye. Perhaps the musical analogy was simply there for the taking: frequency equals pitch.

I was interested to learn that the 50Hz operating frequency of our alternating current is, in fact, just an ideal value. Within a small tolerance (roughly 0.5Hz either side) the frequency fluctuates with demand. I also learned from the displays on Gridwatch that a great deal of information about power generation is reported by the National Grid: demand in megawatts, imported electricity and the split between fuel types such as solar, nuclear and gas.

The demand data also suggested a different way of thinking about the piece. As I completed a few of these sonifications that drew on human activity, rather than natural phenomena such as weather, an idea emerged that every person turning on a kettle or TV and contributing to the demand figure was, at that moment, unconsciously composing the piece.

A recurring theme in my PhD work was returning to the twentieth-century experimental canon for inspiration, revisiting many of the pieces I had read about and admired. The fluctuating frequency put me in mind of La Monte Young's pieces in which he based the fundamental on 60Hz, the grid frequency in the US, influenced by childhood experiences of listening to the hum of transformers near his home.

Singing in the Wires may have been the first piece where I developed a sonification technique that I called "weird numerology". When data appeared as a number, in this case a demand figure in megawatts such as 30221, I would read the individual digits as interval degrees, much like the description of degrees within a chord or scale. For this piece I translated them into harmonics, my very basic approximation of a Youngian approach.

The resulting sonification scheme consisted of a fluctuating fundamental around 50Hz and its subsequent harmonics (2 = 100Hz, 3 = 150Hz, etc.), represented in this version by ten pre-recorded bowed samples (to avoid having to compute them on the fly). The piece is a full-on drone, sounding continuously, with the frequency updating every minute and demand figures every five. There is some smoothing with an analog sounding delay and crossfading is applied so that the drone evolves through time rather than jumping abruptly between values.

One practical issue was that fluctuations of 1Hz are not especially audible to the human ear. Young might disagree, and even my examiner did wonder whether extensive ear training might allow sensitivity to that degree. I therefore applied some scaling so that 1Hz covered a semitone.

The soundworld continues to riff on the La Monte Young connection. I used a processed bowed guitar sample that references the sonority of the Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble, featuring John Cale on viola. I must have read about this ensemble in countless John Cale, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground articles and books during some of my earliest forays into twentieth-century experimental music history, and it was fun to pay homage to it, even if the piece treats those ideas rather more loosely than Young himself might approve of.

Not all of the pieces created for my PhD qualify as what I've called "ambient webpages", but Singing in the Wires can be left on in the background quite successfully and, I think, rewards extended listening.

The original version of Singing in the Wires is documented in my PhD thesis.

Sheffield, August 2026