VRML sketches for a son et lumiere (1999)

by John Stead

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Kepler Harmonies is a series of VRML sketches for 'The Age of Spheres' (1999), a son et lumiere installation utilising computer data projectors and a multi-speaker spatialisation of electro-acoustic music, first performed on Saturday 27th. March 1999 at St. Mary's Lowgate, Hull.

The objects in the virtual space are derived from fractal geometries and images of dragonflies (mostly photographed in Kent during 1998). Each object has attached to it, one of a series of 'musique concrete' instruments consisting entirely of computer transformations of Tibetan and Nepalese bells. As you move in the virtual space, the sounds spatialise with the objects.

The structure of 'The Age of Spheres' is derived from the 'Mysterium Cosmographicum' written by Johannes Kepler in 1596. The musical material is derived from his 'Harmonies of the World' in which Kepler formulates the idea that each planetary body has, as part of it's nature, a series of pitches, which form a harmonious whole.

In the 'Mysterium Cosmographicum', Kepler defines the orbits of the Copernican solar system with creative use of the so called 'platonic solids'. These sacred geometric structures, impose a nest of orbits that related to the observations of the movement of the planets, and in doing this, Kepler, who was just twenty-five at the time, felt that he had uncovered the mind of God in the underlying structures of the universe.

J.S. 1999