The crunch Coda

An Apples and People Commission

This One Minute Piece for Piano and Apple Crunch, by Helena Tibocha and son, Nathan, is called:  ‘The Crunch Coda’.

‘The Crunch Coda’ uses solely the apple’s genomic sequence, ATCG, to inform its musical vocabulary.  The percussive nature of the apple bite is interpreted through “crunchy” rhythmic piano textures and octave transpositions.  Bite samples overlay musical samples to create a satisfyingly energetic artistic experience of the eating of an apple, guaranteed to leave a smile.

The CymaGlyph, or sound image, of the apple-crunch-sound on water made possible by the Cymascope instrument, has been coloured to express both the sequencing of the apple’s DNA – red (showing letter T) and green (showing letter A) in Nicola Busatto’s beautiful photograph of a small part of the apple genome, as well as referencing the genome’s influence on apple skin colour.

The noble crunch image, with crown-like circlet of seed-like gems, is digitised and brought to life, synchronising and pulsating with the music.  This is art & science history in the making: the first ever experience of listening to an apple crunch sound whilst watching the very same sound transformed into a graphic.

“Many apples were eaten in the making of this piece!”

Note from Helena: When I was first in conversation with the Apples and People Commissioner who asked me if I could create a one minute piece of music which incorporated the sound of a bite into an apple and the subsequent crunch, it was during the January 2021 lockdown and my son Nathan, a student at CSM, was home sitting in the chair opposite me.

With Nathan being a whizz at both audio and visual technology, I immediately knew that between us, we would be able to fulfil the commission in the short time we had been offered for the story to be published.

As I visualised the end result, I immediately thought of prior work with John Stuart-Reid, inventor and founder of Cymascope.com and proposed to the commissioner that we take the project to another level and find out what other information was contained in the sound that we could make visible and then illustrate.

The result of my collaboration with Apples and People, Nathan and John Stuart-Reid was more than the sum of its parts - we were able to discover information in the apple crunch sound as evidenced by being played back to apple juice which was then able to reinform the scientists whose work was the purpose of the original published story!

This has been the most meaningful aspect to me of this project: The commissioner turned to artists to creatively illustrate the work of scientists and then the artists were able to converge both art and science, with use of the Cymascope making sound visible, to reinform the scientists.

This result of collaboration between science and art is deeper truth: They are inseparable.

Read more about what we all discovered along the way in the journal entry entitled The Holographic Properties of the Apple Crunch.