Domenico Vicinanza
Abstract
Technology and art are probably two of the most intrinsically linked disciplines in the spectrum of human knowledge. During the past years the involvement of Science and Technology (including Research and Education Networks) in different aspect of social sciences and humanities (SSH) has been constantly growing.
From the occasional liaison with university groups involved in music and art productions, to playing a crucial role in enabling distributed art installations and concerts; from being an informal and sporadic partner to becoming a global enabler, gradually establishing a clear leadership in particular in the field of music, distributed performing arts and auditory display.
The presentation will discuss the complementarity and the natural synergy of art and technology, their role as global languages and how being a global expression of the human creativity it naturally led them to be unique innovators.
About
Domenico Vicinanza is a musician and a scientist. He received his PhD degrees in Physics working at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN, Geneva) and he is a professional music composer and orchestrator. He is a product manager for GÉANT and a Senior Lecturer at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, where he also leads the Electronics and Sound Engineering Research Group.
Always fascinated by how music and science are a continuous quest for harmony, he was one of the pioneer of data sonification for scientific and artistic purposes. Since the end of 1990s he supported scientists in different fields, from hydrobiology to cosmology, from earth science to particle physics providing, through sound, different perspectives to their data.
At the same time he worked on the artistic aspect of writing music from science, creating music pieces by mapping scientific structures to melodies and sounds. He organised several concerts with different ensembles, from solo instruments to chamber and symphonic orchestras, playing music from science. He has an active collaboration with CERN, which commissioned an orchestral piece on scientific data, for their 60th anniversary and with NASA, writing music from data collected by the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes.
Finally, he is also involved in the application of distributed computing and advanced networking technologies to music and visual arts as the founder and technical coordinator of the ASTRA (Ancient instrument Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) and the Lost Sounds Orchestra projects for the reconstruction of musical instruments on the Research and Education networks GÉANT and EUMEDCONNECT.
Revised
21 Mar 2024