BREATH SOUND – TRACING THE SMOKE

The following four audio files are extracted from breath sounds which were generated by a computer model simulating inhalation of opium smoke. Each file depicts one breath cycle. We developed the model for a sound installation titled Labour Lung (2021). The simulation model adopts algorithmic methods of calculation used in biomedical engineering and predictive pathology. But to arrive to this model, we first had to know the properties of opium smoke aerosol, its average particle size distribution and spray velocity. We took an opium pipe and some opium to a laboratory in North Holland to measure this. The pipe was connected to a mechanical inhaler with a laser diffraction sensor that measures the aerosols passing in front of its lens (as seen in the video excerpt Measuring Opium). We then collaborate with professor Anna Barney from the university of Southampton, who is a researcher in biometric acoustic engineering. The data obtained from the lab were used to write the codes for simulating the real-time inhalation of opium and the breath sounds. The simulation, a kind of automated digital lung, uses a probability principle to first arrive at the amount of carbon deposits in the airways with every opium inhalation. From there it calculates the resulting blockages in lung, and finally the crackle and wheeze in the breath sound which are affected by these blockages. With continued inhalation of opium, the deposition of carbon dust increases, resulting in greater airway tightening and thus deformity in the breath sounds.

From the perspective of medicine, breath sound as symptom is often only seen as a departure point, a sign that leads to identifying an illness. In the case of this automated digital lung, this relationship is inverted. The simulation generates the ‘symptom’ as a point of arrival. In this sense, the breath sounds are irreducible to any analytic integration or assimilation; they lack any interpretive (or diagnostic) value. They remain disembodied.

This automated digital lung was produced as part of an ongoing sound work and audio installation titled Labor Lung (2021-present) which follows our long-term interest in the sonic manifestations of opium-induced breath sound. The project askes how the lived and historical reality of an organ like the lung can push us to reconsider its medical and biological determinations, or even demand its technological manipulation? How can simulated breath sounds inspire a respiratory organ that’s more than itself?