TED Talks Daily - A sonic journey through the universe | Felipe Sánchez Luna

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In an astounding sonic experience, creative director Felipe Sánchez Luna takes you on a journey through the universe as told in sound. Take a deep breath, listen closely and discover the power of sound to provide you with a new emotional understanding of the world.

TED Audio Collective my word for it. An attendee in the audience for this 2024 talk from Felipe Sanchez Luna liked it so much that we got them to set it up for you. Felipe Sanchez is going to give a fantastic experiential talk in which you're actually going to participate. Curious? Find out in this immersive experience coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs,

I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. And now our TED Talk of the day. The world is full of sound. It's all around us, all the time. If it's carefully designed, we can use it to tap directly into our feelings and evoke a deeper connection to ourselves and the world.

As a group of composers, sound designers, creative technologists and musicologists, my team and I combine all this knowledge to create sound experiences that convey stories and ideas. We use scientific data as musical scores, translating complex information into a language we can easily understand. We work with field recordings, compose linear and modal music, and use technology to understand, control and generate melodies. We are merging art, music, technology and science into the field of sound sonography, using the auditory sense to foster an emotional understanding of our world.

So let me take you on a sonic journey of music and code, where ones and zeros are mixed with notes and rhythms, and poetry meets science. What you are about to hear is a combination of recordings from nature and our surroundings, data in a hydra of music, and a lot of human creativity. So, relax. And if you feel comfortable close your eyes, take a deep breath and listen closely. Allow yourself to feel. We begin in the water. Here in the deep we hear tiny creatures, different textures or even the contrast between the

Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. We follow the sounds of seal and bring the allusive song of the harbour poipers to the The ocean is speaking to us. I'm sorry. Let's move out of the water into dry land and dig deep into the earth. Countless small animals like earthworms, grubs and ants, they interact, they communicate and work tirelessly to maintain a perfect ecosystem. Through geophones and soil sensors we can capture these voices and hear the soil singing to us. But it's our human creativity that can interprets, modulates, filters, and mixes all these recordings with music, creating a tapestry of sound that gives a voice to the complex world hidden under our feet. From here we take flight high into the sky. Feel the lightness of traveling through air, while enjoying the mystical messages carried by birds' songs. Let's focus our attention on the herd with thrush as it sings to us. We hear that song is a message that if we slow it down we can comprehend.

Every bird finds his voice in this intricate orchestration and while they all play together in perfect harmony we need to find our place in this acoustic ecosystem. Let's keep moving, up into the sky, through the atmosphere, into the vast emptiness of space. In this abstract place, where there is no sound, we reach only to the power of music to try to make sense out of the relationship between sound and time. As the sound of a voice, we travel to the center of a black hole and wonder what will happen to us in the presence of this cosmic force. We are being stretched as our musical body just falls apart. New and old musical concepts collide into a timeless sound mass, leaving all sense of structure behind.

We are surrounded by the past, the present and the future. All at the same time, what information and matter lose all their meaning. It is here, in this emptiness, that we find ourselves traveling to the human imagination, an infinitely magical place bound only by our creativity. We hear artificial intelligence making music and melodies remind us of the importance of emotional communication, while simultaneously giving us an idea of the creative process being enhanced by technology. As we return from our journey and rejoin one another in this room, let us embrace the force of human imagination and use sound to connect deeper to ourselves and to others. Let us open ourselves to the transformative power of sound and its contribution to a new emotional understanding of our world. Thank you. down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. That was Felipe Sanchez Luna from the TED 2024 stage. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.

TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

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