Nature of Neptune

The Sea Organ of Zadar

The city planners of Zadar, Croatia have come up with a unique and harmonious way to meld their coastal city with the surrounding ocean.  Designed by architect Nicola Basic, the Sea Organ (Morske Orgulje) encloses 35 underwater pipes that resonate musically from the lapping of the waves.  The Sea Organ is located right along the water, underneath a series of long, elegant white stone steps where residents and tourists can sit and relax (photos by felber).

The Sea Organ is cleverly engineered to create musical notes from the motion of the ocean.  When you properly blow into a hollow cylinder, such as a flute, a didgeridoo, or an empty beer bottle, you are inducing the air inside to vibrate at the object's resonant frequency.  If it falls in the range of human hearing, this specific frequency is heard as a single musical note.  The pipes in the Sea Organ are designed to resonate when water rushes into them, causing the air to be pushed upwards through the tubes.  Ocean waves ebb and flow, making the pipes resonate frequently.

Listen to the Sea Organ

From a critical standpoint, why should ocean waves be turned into musical tones?  Is the sound of breaking waves not soothing enough?  Yet think about where ocean waves come from.  Waves themselves are created in the open ocean by steady gusts of wind.  The wind provides the driving force for water resonance in a very similar way that blowing across the opening of a flute provides the driving force for acoustic resonance.  Thus, in a way, the sounds of the Sea Organ represent the winds across the open ocean, brought to the coastline encoded in waves of water, where they are re-released inside the organ's pipes.  The organ draws attention to this environmental cycle.

The notes of the Sea Organ may be "played" randomly, but they are not arbitrary.  The 35 pipes are separated into seven sections of five, where each section forms a chord of a diatonic scale.  The five sections alternate two different but harmonious chords, G and C6.  According to a paper by the Acoustical Society of Croatia, this arrangement was chosen to reflect the four-voice male singing tradition of the region.

 

Both photos of the Sea Organ were taken by felber, and the sound clip and diagram are from Oddmusic.  Watch an interesting video about the organ from National Geographic, and you can even buy a 70 minute cd of Sea Organ sounds here.

Articulating the Wind: The Architectural Facades of Ned Kahn

One of my favorite trends in contemporary urban architecture, a simple pleasure really, is the lining of buildings with enormous mirrored windows that reflect the city and sky around them.  This melds the buildings to their surroundings, and draws attention to the physical space between them.

Artist Ned Kahn takes this visual trick to another level.  He has created a number of architectural facades and monuments that consist entirely of small mirrored or semi-mirrored squares, each hanging from low friction joints.  Each of these small squares dangles independently, responding only to the wind.  When viewed from a distance, they outline the shapes of the wind gusts ripping across the sides of the buildings (the photo is of the facade for the Technorama science center in Switzerland, taken by Christopher Stumm).  Not only do these squares reflect the surroundings, the sky, and the sunlight, but they show the actual shape of the air around the buildings.  The video below shows the Technorama facade in motion, and I also highly recommend this video of Kahn's Articulated Cloud facade at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum.

The wind, which you can usually only feel and hear, is visualized in Kahn's facades.  Kahn and others have described his work as "digitizing" the wind and the air, but I feel that this trendy allusion misses the point.  First of all, the squares have a range of motion, not just "up" or "down", meaning they are not purely digitized into 0's and 1's.  They can look dark or light, or many grays in between.  Secondly, there is no intrinsic reason to "digitize" the wind around a building.  To do so would introduce postmodern concepts of cultural juxtaposition that are completely unnecessary here.

"Quantization" is a much better way to describe what these pieces are showing.  The small squares each represent a "quantized" unit of space, each moving independently of each other.  When acted upon by the wind, they form the shapes of moving waves, each square being excited individually.  This provides a wonderful metaphor for the structure of air itself, which is made up of tiny "quantized" molecules that bump around, giving rise to the gusts of wind we can feel and hear.  It is also a stunning analogy for modern physics, especially in the realm of quantum field theory, where forces are described as both fields and quantized particles at the same time.  That is what Kahn's facades are: a bunch of individual squares, and a pattern of propagating waves and ripples, existing simultaneously.