Chris Chafe (Music) and Nikolaos Hanselmann (Visuals) and Greg Niemeyer (Cook) team up to serve a night of tomato music. During the last week of August, they will let 5 cases of different varieties of tomatoes (from Chafe’s garden) ripen to perfection at Machine Project. They will record the ripening process by tracking the changes in CO2 that the ripening produces. They will store the CO2 changes during the week as a time series, compress it along the time axis, and translate the changes to a musical scale. The resulting music, a bit like a sonic time-lapse, is a sonification of 7 days of ripening in the course of 49 minutes.

On Friday August 31st, they will play those 49 minutes of music while serving pasta with tomato sauce made on-site from the perfectly ripened tomatoes. Seeds to grow your own tomatoes next year will be offered as well.

Chafe and Niemeyer collaborated previously on projects with music and interactive electronics, including PING (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001), Oxygen Flute (San Jose Museum of Art, 2002) and several live performances. Oxygen Flute tracked changes in CO2 levels in a greenhouse and generated flute music from the Carbon cycle between plants and people in the greenhouse.