One cloud, five passes
The same NIRSpec observation, worked five separate times, played back to back. The cloud does not change between passes. The listening does.
The second program in Before Birth is a concept piece, and the concept is almost aggressively simple.
One observation — a NIRSpec cube, jw02457-o054, grating G235H with the F170LP filter. It was worked five separate times, on five separate occasions, each pass a roughly twenty-four minute reading of the same data. The five readings were trimmed to twenty-three minutes each and are played in order, as five movements.
Nothing about the cube changes across the five. It is the same file, the same photons, the same numbers on disk. What changes is the attention brought to it.
This is the collection’s argument in miniature: the data is fixed, the attention is the instrument. A sonification is often described as though the mapping does all the work — pick wavelength for pitch, flux for amplitude, and the piece falls out mechanically. It does not. Between the same cube and five different hours of someone’s life, five different pieces of music happened, and the differences are not noise. They are the reading.
We find this clarifying rather than embarrassing. The alternative framing — that there is one correct sonification of a dataset and the rest are errors — would make the whole practice a search for a mapping nobody has found yet. Playing the five in sequence puts the point beyond argument. You hear the same object five times and you hear it differently five times, and by the fourth you stop listening for the cloud and start listening for the listener.
It also creates an obligation, which is the subject of a different set of notes: if attention is doing this much work, the record of what was actually done has to be exact. A piece of music that cannot say which cube it came from is a decoration. Five passes are only interesting if you can prove they were five passes over the same thing.