By: Prof. Paul Moore, Prof. Frank Lyons, Greg O’Hanlon, Brian Bridges

The River Foyle in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland, carries significant cultural and political meaning for those who live in the area. The River Sings is a real-time, interactive and collaborative sound installation (bringing together musicians/sound artists and developers) using specifically developed software to extract and process data from the River Foyle, generating a sonic output made up of voices or drones, allowing the river to ‘sing its story’.

The data for the installation is collected in real time using sensors in the river and is then mapped to sound generating parameters through a variety of processing tools. The sonic output is diffused through an 8.1 speaker system to the gallery, changing as the data from the river (wave patterns, vibrations, sounds of the water) changes.
The opportunity to ‘sing with the river’ adds an interactive element. A graphic score for countertenor (as detailed by Deleuze in the ‘refrain’) is generated from the river data allowing singing with the sounds of the river in a refrain/response mode.

The theoretical grounding for the project is to be found in three concepts: the idea of the memetic as proposed by Allen Weiss; the notion of ‘refrain’ as developed by Deleuze; and Cage’s concept of indeterminacy.