Witness 4: The Visitor

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2020-08-07

Label: Omnempathy

This album marks the night when the newly-discovered Comet Neowise came closest to Earth, on 23/24 July 2020. With the comet visible in the sky above, Begg collaborated with fellow composer, Ben Ponton, to simultaneously gather sound and satellite data tracking the comet from their localities in East Lothian and Newcastle upon Tyne, to form the basis of the two compositions featured in the album. Witness 4 is a timestamp commemorating an unexpected and captivating celestial visitor.

As with the previous albums in the series, Witness 4 uses Begg's Witness Engine, a suite of software he has compiled to capture real time data feeds from satellites and environmental monitoring stations, which is then converted into music. While the engine was running in East Lothian, sonifying satellite and air quality data, Ponton gathered location recordings in Newcastle from one of the city's air quality monitoring stations, a central point in the city's 1000 acre Town Moor, and VLF radio waves generated by electrical activity in the planet's magnetosphere.