GÉANT Birthday Song – “NREN Melody”
 
A special GÉANT birthday song, composed by Domenico Vicinanza using text sonification, will be played for you at the beginning of the Plenary. The composition is created using the names of those NRENs and partners involved in the project, with a melody generated by associating a note to each letter.

The note pitch was chosen according to the position of the letter into the English alphabet, using a diatonic scale. According to this mapping, the letter ”S”, for example, will sound a tone higher than letter ”R” and a ”T” two tones higher and so on. The duration of the notes has been chosen as follows: vowels duration is set to 1/8 (quaver) and consonants duration is set to 1/16 (semiquaver). This simple sonification algorithm is able to reflect any regularity in the NREN names list into melody regularity. For example, many NREN names end with “net”, which is always sonified to the same three notes, a little musical phrase. It is in fact possible to listen to the music and quite easily spot the recurrent melody fragment.
In addition to the NREN names sonification, two other elements were used. Some melodic fragments were created using an Asian music scale (pentatonic scale), and the rhythmic structure is based on a clave, typical of Latin American music: a musical metaphor for the interconnection of GÉANT and its counterpart networks around the world.

The “NREN Melody” was created on EGI (European Grid Initiative) computing infrastructure, which is based on the GÉANT network. The text sonification technique was pioneered by the monk, Guido d'Arezzo, at the beginning of the 11th Century.

Click here to download the song as an mp3 file or as a mobile phone ringtone