Hi! My name is Cory and I am a small town artist who makes environmental and ecological inspired artwork. In this video I document the process and talk about the ideas behind a sound art project called Sun Song.

This summer has been hot, especially in California. With temperatures reaching well above 100F daily, it is a constant struggle for an artist who makes work in and with nature. Instead of fighting the sun, this time I came up with an idea to collaborate with it by DIY'ing a weird but simple glass bottle instrument, doing a little science experiment work, and trying my hand at making music...

I decided to use the Sun's power to evaporate water to make an artwork. I wanted to create some kind of sound collage, sound art, experimental music, or song that was fueled by the sun. I used glass bottles filled with water (tuned to an extended A chord) and the sun re-tuned them during the entire month of July. When the sun set on July 31st, I brought the bottles in and began working on creating something out of what the sun had changed for me. It was quite dissonant, but there were still relationships to be found.

Deciding to tune the bottles to an A chord took a few weeks of research. When I found the information on NASA's sun sonification program webpage, I was instantly inspired. According to their research the sun resonates at about a frequency of 0.0033hz — way too low for us to hear! However, using a formula to solve for pitch, 0.0033hz is close to a very very low A. I expanded on the A note using the A scale to make a chord using the glass bottles. (I'm not a musician so this was done to the best of my ability!)

This was an extremely challenging yet rewarding conceptual art project to work on! Big thanks to anyone checking it out!

You can view Sun Song with extra images on its portfolio page here:
https://www.corymorrisonart.com/sun-song

Credits to NASA, ESA, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division, Alexander Kosovichev, Stanford Experimental Physics Lab, producers Katie Atkinson and Micheala Sosby, and editor Rob Garner for publishing information on sun sonification. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/...

NASA Media Usage Guidelines: "NASA content - images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format - generally are not subject to copyright in the United States. You may use this material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages." https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guide...

More research:

http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com...

How to Convert Frequency to Pitch Formula:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/0...

Credit for three Free to Use Creative Commons stock videos used and altered from Pexels.com:
Videos by Abraham Braun: https://www.pexels.com/video/light-re...
https://www.pexels.com/video/lights-r...
Video by Abdul Wahab : https://www.pexels.com/video/beautifu...
Video by Indigo Blackwood: https://www.pexels.com/video/the-sun-...