Dublin’s River Liffey
Liffey’s hidden voice not music to our ears, scientists discover
Independent.ie
The River Liffey has been a constant source of artistic inspiration – from Jack Yeats’s paintings to Anna Livia Plurabelle, the centre of Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/liffeys-hidden-voice-not-music-to-our-ears-scientists-discover-38726943.html
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/article38726942.ece/2e5ea/AUTOCROP/h342/2019-11-26_iri_55189898_I1.JPG
The River Liffey has been a constant source of artistic inspiration – from Jack Yeats’s paintings to Anna Livia Plurabelle, the centre of Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’.
And now, after a year of intense research, a team of scientists has managed to “sonify and vocalise” the river, by taking detailed mineral samples and transforming their findings into a musical score.
In short, they have unearthed the hidden voice of the Liffey, which as it turns out, lacks some of the majesty and eloquence Joyce may have attributed to it.
“When we listened to it, it was as rough as a badger’s arse,” said Sean Taylor, lead researcher of Softday.
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“It did not sound nice at all. I know that when it comes to art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it did not sound good.”
Mr Taylor’s business partner, computer scientist Mikael Fernström, took the mineral data and assigned values to musical notes – converting the water samples into a score, ‘Uisce Salach (Dirty Water)’.
Irish Independent
