Valery Vermeulen PhD – a Belgian mathematician, lecturer, and electronic musician, has just completed an electronic music album made entirely of data from black holes.
Valery worked with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hertog, former colleague and long-time collaborator of Stephen Hawking, to collect gravitational wave data for the project, entitled Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001. Bridging the worlds of both art and science, Valery has built innovative systems and techniques to translate huge amounts of data and mathematical models into sound and music, i.e. data sonification.
It has been signed to Ash International (https://ashinternational.com/), a subsidiary of the renowned London label Touch, available now in all stores.
Exclusive source material used for the album originates from simulations of black hole mergers, gravitational waves, neutron stars, elementary particle behaviour near black holes and white dwarfs. Data was gathered and produced in collaboration with several academic partners. These include the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alabama (US), the Institute for Theoretical Physics at KU Leuven (BE), the Centre for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics at KULeuven (BE) ), the Department of Mathematics at the University of Antwerp (BE), physicists Prof. Dr. Matthias Kaminski and Prof. Dr. Thomas Hertog, former colleague and long time collaborator of Stephen Hawking.
The album was realized with the support of Concertgebouw Brugge (BE).
Bridging the fields of mathematics and music, Vermeulen has designed bespoke data sonification systems to create otherworldly expansive soundscapes, that guide us into the higher dimensional realms of deep space and reality.