I presented last night about my upcoming expedition at Ada's Technical Books in Seattle. I thought of Ada's as soon as I got the nod to do this, because they draw a particular kind of techo-science clientele. I thought that IceCube & neutrinos would be appealing, and I had hoped to reach out to some folks about the ukulele project. Have I told you about the ukulele project? I even came up with an acronym: ACDU (Autonomous Cosmic Ray Ukulele) .
So, I'm a musician. I've done a LOT of things over the 40 years I've been playing, and have done somewhere close to a 1,000 gigs: punk, funk, jazz(ish) , rock, electronic, noise, improvised. I even did a 24-hour long performance of electronic music in a storefront window in downtown Seattle (about 25 years ago).
Most recently, I've been playing traditional acoustic Hawaiian music in a band called Na Hilahila Boys (The Shameshame Boys, a line from a traditional song we do) Quite a shift from some of my earlier stuff. You can check that out at: www.nahilahila.org
The last couple of years, I've been taking a ukulele most everywhere I go. I like to sit somewhere spectacular and improvise a nice tune.
Here's a piece I made up from about a year and a half ago. My wife took me to Spain and London, and on this afternoon, we're sitting on the lawn of the famous and historical Greenwich ObservatoryA location used for observing terrestrial and/or celestial events.:
Of course I'm going to take a ukulele to the South Pole. I reached out to a startup company that's making carbon fiber ukuleles – relatively impervious to the dry and cold of Antarctica. More on that company if they come through. We're never entirely confident about startups, are we?
When I was at the Pole in 2002, musician and world traveler Henry Kaiser had been through a short time before and left a carbon fiber acoustic guitar at the music studio in the South Pole Station. (You can see him playing this guitar in Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World.) I'm hoping to do the same with the ukulele.
But I was kicking ideas around: "What can I do that grabs more people's interest? What hasn't already been done?" We ( I count myself part of the IceCube Project – I've been working with this stuff for nearly two decades) have sent a teacher to the Pole nearly every year. I don't need to repeat any of their work. I mean, when I was there before, I made some movies and uploaded them, but that was before YouTube. I know. Ancient History. PolarTREC teacher and friend Kate Miller made a not unsimilar movie "South Pole Station Tour" that has about 700,000 views! I do NOT need to make another of those.
I thought about the ukulele, and I thought about all the projects I've done connecting physics and art. And I talked about it with former student and current energetic physics instructor at the University of Washington-Bothell, and we came up with ACDU. A Raspberry Pi (tiny low-power computer) will take in sensor input from radiation detectors, and light, temperature, and humidity sensors, and use code algorithms to pluck strings and fret notes: environment into music!
We're hoping that we can make our open-source code available online, and that while I'm at the Pole I can download different versions of the code submitted from people all over the world, and perform different "songs". I know. Cool.
I'm headed up to UW-Bothell this afternoon to mete with Jay's student group.
Ada's talk was small, but very pleasant. :)
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