Curated by Shazeb Shaikh
Produced by Pro Helvetia and Story of Foundation
Thanks to Eric Michel (Paris Observatory), Luc Labenne (Labenne Meteorites), Matthieu Gounelle (Paris Museum of Natural History) and SVARAM (Pondicherry Musical Instruments and Research)
Workshop
Satellite Sonata was a musical encounter with 5 local musicians (Mumbai Police Band and Goa Orchestra) conducted by Santiago Lusardi-Girelli for the Story of Space Festival, an educational and artistic event in Panjim, Goa.
Through recordings, videos and workshops, we embarked on new musical territory by improvising on a score generated from satellite data, exploring contemporary playing techniques and practicing intuitive improvisations, in order to make a series of impromptu appearances in public spaces around the city of Panjim.
In parallel, a 4.5 billion year old meteorite was exhibited at the Adil Shah Gallery in Panjim, accompanied by recordings of the performances. Thanks to it’s vertical cuts, the meteorite also doubles as a musical instrument and can be played with a bow to produces a series of resonating tones.
Satellite Sonata
Launched in 2006, the CoRoT satellite (lead by the French Space Agency CNES) measured the minuscule variations of the light of the stars. Through analysis of this twinkling of the stars, scientists can understand the physical composition of stars, their life cycles or even detect planets rotating around them.
In 2008 Prof. Eric Michel of the Paris Observatory develops a method that allows him to translate the CoRoT measurements into sound and thus listen to waves produced by the stars. In 2011, with Prof.
