“Music as a Language to Communicate and Engage” with Dr. Dom Vicinanza

On 27 February 2025, Arts & Science students had the unique experience of participating in a workshop led by physicist and composer Dr. Dom Vicinanza (Anglia Ruskin University), which examined how music can explore and communicate scientific data and the connections between art and technology.

Dr. Vicinanza shared some of his interesting research work with NASA, CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), and Yellowstone National Park and asked students to consider, how, as he puts it, “music can be a power tool to engage with audiences and communicate complexity.”

During the workshop, Dr. Vicinanza demonstrated how mapping interesting features of a research environment and turning these into music allows scientists to tell a story about their findings that follows the intervals, rhythms, and other characteristics of the original data. In music created through some of his fascinating work at Yellowstone National Park, for example, “Old Faithful” is brought to life through rhythmic and melodic shifts derived from infrasonic measurements of the geyser. The result is a song that feels quite distinct from the steady melody created from data gathered from the park’s bubbling mud pots. As such examples suggest, the process of data sonification that Dr. Vicinanza demonstrated can encourage listeners to experience data in an auditory form that might support different forms of understanding and insight.

Students at the workshop also had an opportunity to try out the process of developing their own musical work using scientific data. Drawing on real-time observations recorded at Canadian tidal stations, they worked to translate water level fluctuations into music using simple software. Participants chose to access sensor data from stations located everywhere from Burlington to Thunder Bay to Ottawa to the Arctic, playing with these materials and beginning to develop original music that represented their selected data sets.

Throughout the workshop, Dr. Vicinanza encouraged students to continue exploring and developing work that fractures the binary between the arts and the sciences. As he reminded attendees, “art needs technology and technology needs art.”

About Dr. Dom Vicinanza
Dom is a scientist, composer, journalist, and public speaker. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in physics and worked as a scientific associate at CERN for seven years. His research there mainly focused on the development of an innovative time-of-flight detector for one of the biggest High-Energy Physics experiments for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Dom also studied Orchestration for Cinema and Television at Berklee College of Music and, as a music composer and science communicator, he has worked with organisations like CERN and NASA, creating music from scientific data. He was an Artist in Residence at the University of Exeter, working at the Engineering Department to turn structural data into music.

Dom holds the first US National Park Service permit to conduct research at Yellowstone National Park, which enables him to create concert music pieces from infrasonic measurements.

Dom’s research has been featured in several international peer-reviewed magazines (Physics Letters B, Nuclear Instruments and Methods, European Physics Journal) and in interviews for The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, BBC, CNN, Discovery Channel, Discover magazine, New Scientist and Scientific American.

His music has been played by Vladimir Ashkenazy, the European Youth Orchestra, the United Nation Orchestra, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.