Elements 56: Barium – Oscar van Dillen

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Barium

Barium (Ba) has a special use in a single group of living organisms, the single-celled Desmidiales or Desmids, green algae containing Barium Sulfate BaSO₄ crystals in constant Brownian motion. It is suspected these heavy molecules, suspended in one end of the cell only, may help it sense gravity, space, and facilitate up and down orientation.

Barium, the 6^th period element of the 2^nd group is a heavy atom, much heavier than its upper neighbor Strontium, yet not nearly as heavy as the true heavyweights among the elements, such as Gold (79) or Lead (82). All elements heavier still (except Bismuth) are unstable, too big and in decay, slowly disintegrating and therefore radioactive.

Barium is opaque to x-rays and used daily in hospitals. People are fed a “Barium Meal” before x-ray images are taken of their intestines, showing these in a clear outline. Barium itself would be highly toxic, so again we see Barium Sulfate being used here. These ions Ba²⁺ and SO₄^2- are like best friends, very hard to separate. Their atomic bond is so strong that even the acidity of the stomach does not affect it, and for the better. Barium would block Potassium moving out of nerve cells, killing nervous activities and life.

Music of Barium

The music of Barium was created from a triple layered spectral germ-cell, from which everything is composed.

*spectral germ-cell of barium colored in three layers*

The yellow-colored layer was used to simulate a kind of Brownian motion bass register, in which many possibilities can be heard simultaneously. Going far beyond the 1950’s and 60’s deterministic avant-garde experiments by Xenakis, this is a true music of possibilities and probabilities, especially in the sense that it plays with the probability an attentive listener will hear or not hear certain phenomena.

One of the phenomena one can possibly hear is a very fast tempo driving the music in an almost free-jazz forward motion, not arising from bass progressions nor percussive sounds, but from the structured chaos of the interacting registers, which are polyphonically tied together. All in all the music of Barium yields an extremely intense listening experience. Despite the space it also offers, the listener can be overwhelmed by the stream of sound. As to the space one hears enveloping the sound: in the production of this work no added reverb at all was used, space was created with polyphonic and micro-canonic means.

As with the former album, a track with the complete music without sections has been added, to enable gapless playback also on those streaming platforms that briefly halt between tracks, disturbingly interrupting the continuous flow in a manner not suited for this music.

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Music created as pure audio begs the question at which volume it should be played. The relative dynamics are of course fixed in the recording but at the same time there is no score indicating the average loudness as in ff or mf. The music of the series Elements will have a different effect at various volumes of playback, indicating there is some relationship to absolute loudness in play. This is clearly the case with the music of Barium, so much so that the composer felt obliged to add the full track to this album yet another time, but now as pianissimo pp. This quieter version of the exact same music leads to a very different listening experience indeed. To compare these two complete versions: the loud one is mastered at -14.2 LUFS(I) and the soft one at -28.2 LUFS(I) with a subtle expansion (1.5:1 ratio) and a subtle 3dB more volume in the side channel, to eventually create a similar overall loudness range (7.6 and 7.8 LUFS(R) respectively).
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