At TU Dublin’s recital hall, a group of artists performs the city’s housing crisis as music

Composer David Bremner introduced his latest work to an audience at the TU Dublin recital hall on 23 April.

Much of the four-month creative process for Housing Data ~ Sonified involved research, he told the room.

He and his collaborators, violinist Larissa O’Grady and writer Christodoulos Makris, looked at data from the Central Statistics Office and the Central Bank.

“And also, those who are profiting from the property crisis, like asset managers, fund managers and so on,” he said.

Then they turned the data into music, Bremner said on that Tuesday evening to a group of about 30 people in the university’s East Quad building in Grangegorman.

The ears are very sensitive instruments, he said, “and are able to really gather data and understand data, and take in information”.

An early example of sonification – conveying information with non-speech audio – is the Geiger counter, an electronic instrument which clicks faster or slower as it detects higher or lower levels of radiation.

In Housing Data ~ Sonified, Bremner and his collaborators laced in homelessness figures, data around housing assistance payments, Airbnb listings, house prices, rents, building permits and more.

Bremner’s idea, fundamentally, is to give his audience a chance to be immersed within these datasets, and potentially pick up on patterns that may hide beneath the glut of housing information, he says.

“Partly what we’re trying to do here is trying to put patterns into music and see what comes out,” he says.

Historic data

In the warmly lit recital hall at around 7.45pm, Bremner sat down at a Steinway grand piano. He was joined by Mark Redmond, an uilleann pipes player.

Housing Data ~ Sonified is a work in two parts. An introductory overture, and the main composition which is spread across 10 short movements.

The overture, titled “The Landlords of/or Ireland” seeks to translate into music a lengthy registry called The Landowners of Ireland.

Compiled by Hussey De Burgh and published in 1878, the registry lists the owners of estates bigger than 500 acres, or valued at £500 and upwards, across Ireland.

The nine-minute composition begins abruptly with Bremner and Redmond playing together, but performing in different time signatures, occasionally aligning.

Redmond’s pipes loop and weave brightly around Bremner as he rhythmically hammers away at a series of chords, loosely based around a single motif.

From time to time, Bremner’s key strikes imitate Redmond’s rollicking pipes. The duo descend into passages of deeper drones and cacophonous melodies.

It is as if two different songs, from two different eras, are being played. The pipes evoke pastoral images, while the piano leans towards a more contemporary urban place.

Bremner’s thought, he told the audience, was to examine how the musical patterns created by compiling 19th-century data might draw a parallel with the sounds produced by contemporary figures.

That it has a more Irish traditional quality to it is coincidental, he said, later. “Anytime you use the uilleann pipes, they’re always going to sound more traditional.”

Signals in the noise

After the overture, Bremner was joined by Larissa O’Grady on the violin and writer Christodoulos Makris, who stood before a microphone.

Their performance, titled “Press Play”, is in 10 movements.

Each tackles a different strand of the housing crisis – including planning permissions, investment funds, government policy, construction output, homelessness, living at home, and the far right.

The songs were created through the process known as data sonification using Max/MSP, a visual programming language for music, Bremner said, two days later in a glassy meeting room in the TU Dublin East Quad building. “That means using raw data as a musical material.”

It differs from writing a piece inspired by an issue, he says. “You are literally using the information, and somehow every note in the piece is derived from the dataset.”

The listener is hearing information patterns, he says. Maybe, a comparison between home repossessions and evictions, or how housing prices have changed between 2005 and 2023.

Musically, it can be a challenging, and at times unsettling, listen. How a song unfurls is not down to Bremner’s musical choices, but the rise and fall of a graph.

In the first movement of “Press Play”, titled ‘Planning Permission’, O’Grady and Bremner portray the sound of notices of termination filed with the Residential Tenancies Board between 2019 and 2023.

As the music depicts this four-year period, there is a key change that signifies the government’s eviction ban between November 2022 and March 2023, Bremner says.

O’Grady’s violin plays a melody that jumps up and down. Bremner’s piano appears in bursts, sometimes harmonious, other times discordant.

Silences between chords vary in their lengths.

Each jarring musical choice corresponds to a real event. One early change in key signifies the eviction ban, Bremner says.

“We also have this very sinister sounding harmonic change that goes from the bottom of the piano to the top, and that’s the amount of money going into investment funds from 2011 to 2023,” he says.

“It’s pretty relentless,” says Bremner.

Fragments of information

Against this volatile music, Christodoulos Makris begins to speak, reading a text assembled from numerous studies, reports and transcripts.

“Housing output has grown, but not enough,” he says. “We are making more. Too slow progress.”

Then: “These statistics are provisional and will be revised.”

Makris’ narration is a collage of statements. They are enigmatically vague. But so too do they help the audience to grasp which specific aspects of the housing crisis Bremner and O’Grady are exploring.

“Opportunities will abound due to repricing,” he says.

All of the text is found, rather than written by Makris himself, he says. “It’s also taken from various sources, speeches, Dáil sessions, interviews with people that were affected by these issues.”

Later, during the movement titled ‘Government Policy’, he recites platitudes that end without a point.

“As Minister for Finance, my department and I have proactively … ,” he says, over a sombre violin and a deep piano melody that scuttles about, quicker and quicker, jumping around in octaves.

Bremner and his colleagues were interested in obfuscation, he says. “Some of this data isn’t complete, and there are things that are deliberately hidden.”

Makris wanted to echo this, he says. “It was deliberate to remove what seems to be the point, or where meaning was held, to reflect that.”

For about 30 minutes, there are abrupt pauses and volatile tempos. Sudden melodic flurries fade into a gentle solo violin, only to be interrupted by piano keys with an ominous plod.

Future performances of “Press Play” may be an entirely different experience, Bremner says.

This performance used mostly Dublin datasets, Bremner says. “But we want to tour the piece, and we’re looking into how we can customise it, using local datasets from around the country.”

Bremner finds himself in an interesting position as a composer of a piece influenced not by his personal taste but the found information, he says. “It’s quite similar to the discussions people have in AI.”

As a composer, he wants to be open to what is happening in the world, he says.

“And using found data, or material that isn’t from my internal creativity, is a way of engaging, as an artist with the world,” says Bremner. “It finds a way of making this into a conversation rather than a broadcast.”