Background & Idea

Inspired by the famous paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) by philosopher Thomas Nagel, the

work at hand deals with the hard problem of consciousness and subjectivity. Arguing, that we can

never access anyone’s mind, I came to the idea to build a proof-me-wrong manifestation of Nagel’s

thought play. He chose the example of a bat as a mammal, which, as we can imagine, might have

some kind of subjective experience. However, it couldn’t be more distant to us, since it can fly, barley

see, sleep upside down, has magnetic sense and most importantly sonar. If we now try to how it

would be to be a bat, it couldn’t get closer, than a human trying to be an animal. This has nothing to

do with the actual experience of a bat. We don’t even know, if the bats sonar is in any sense similar to

our auditory perception. Eventually, this leads to the conclusion, that even if we have advanced

technology and science to measure and simulate bats behaviour and biological system, we will never

know, what their qualia is like. With these thoughts in mind, I started the work.

Technical and artistical realization

Technically, the artwork consists of a Bela computer (Linux based), three ultra sonic sensors, a 9 DoF

(Degrees of Freedom) Gyroscope, Accelerometer and Magnetometer as well as a battery pack with its

respective circuits to charge and switch. The Bela Computer runs several python scripts and a

supercollider script, generating musical sounds in real-time. All sensors are interconnected and

influencing the sound.

I decided to not sonify the sensor inputs in a traditional way, since this work aims at the

inaccessibility of the qualia. Instead, I chose to compose my own sonic interpretation of the bats

mind. The sound consists of three randomly generated, atonal soundscapes, triggered at a distance of

around 5 meters by each sensor. The soundscapes are panned to the respective position (left, middle,

right). Similarly, an arpeggiator is tiggered at a distance of 3 meters. The closer it gets, the more alive

and intense is the sound. The arpeggiator complement each other harmonically. Depending, whether

the user looks up or down, the harmonics of the arpeggiator changes in its pitch and its chords.

Finally, a piano chord generator is getting triggered, by the movements through space. A possibility

of more than 40 harmonics in different timings is possible.

What Is It (not) Like to Be a Bat?

Within the work, I am obviously not trying to answer this question. We will never know, what it is

like to be a Bat, or any other living being. With our ongoing technological and scientific

advancements, we get the impression, that consciousness might be demystified soon – or is even

already. But the fact is, that we still know only little about it. Maybe we will even never solve that

riddle. The work tries to open up the discussion, of where simulations can lead us and where they

can’t, while approaching the topic in a playful way. At the end, everyone has to decide themselves, if

they know now, how it is like to be a bat.