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Listening to Natural Radio
A quantitative musical analysis of natural VLF phenomena — sferics, tweeks, whistlers, chorus and hiss, the “natural radio” listened to by researchers, amateurs and composers from Alvin Lucier to Stephen P. McGreevy. The thesis reads these signals through Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology, with measurable spectral descriptors, and tests whether the timing of events is compatible with a Poisson process, one of the stochastic models of Iannis Xenakis’s Formalized Music, while exploring five compositional systems as hypotheses on the sequence of intervals.
Events are detected with a calibrated pipeline written in Python and replicated in a Max patch, the Rilevatore, on a public corpus of VLF recordings, with protocols fixed before the data were seen. The result is deliberately cautious: of the stretches sparse enough to allow a verdict, most are compatible with Poisson, and the stochastic hypothesis is not ruled out; two traces remain worth following — a clustering of events at long time scales, and a strong regularity of whistlers in one hand-labelled file.
typethesis — Second-level academic diploma, two-year Master’s programme in Electronic Music
institutionConservatorio di Milano
supervisorAchim Bornhöft
yearacademic year 2025–2026
languageItalian (97 pages); the preview below is an English translation of pages 1–10
keywordsVLF, whistlers, sferics, spectromorphology, Xenakis, Poisson
preview — pages 1–10, English translation
Scroll inside the frame. Front matter, Chapter 1 and the opening of Chapter 2.
full text
The complete thesis (in Italian) can be consulted through the library of the Conservatorio di Milano: servizi.biblioteca@consmilano.it. For questions about the research, write to daniele.facchettisd@gmail.com.