“Using the mathematical relationship between string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music's underlying structure and subtle shifts”
Musical scores are a precise set of actions: play this note, at this speed, at this volume, for this duration, with these other notes. They are read and then played. They are rules for the future, outlining the sounds to be played.
Sonograms (also known as spectrograms) and waveforms exist after the sounds have been played. They are visual artifacts of the sound. Sonograms show the spectrum of frequencies in a sound selection with time along the horizontal axis and frequency along the vertical axis. The colour intensity often represents the amplitude of the individual frequencies. When frequency is shown logarithmically, rather than linearly, the musical and tonal relationships are emphasized.2
Scores and sonograms bracket the event of music being produced.
A sonogram is a visual analysis of a recording, of sound already played
By parsing out notes from the sonogram, I’m going through a translation of played > recorded > parsed > replayed in a new context
Using the sonogram to approximate a note and then building it into the composition
Bird songs are complex, polyphonic yet the score (In C) is composed of single notes, no chords – monophonic
Experimental Notation Precedents
Robert MoranLouis Andriessen, Blokken from “Souvenirs d’enfance”Brian Eno’s graphic notation for Music for Airports, published on the back of the album sleeveArtist John De Cesare’s rendition of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”Gyorgy LigetiKonstellationen by Roman Haubenstock Ramati
Aleatoric music is a form of composition in which a significant element is left to the determination of its performers. Terry Riley’s “In C” is a composition of 53 phrases to be played in sequence, but each performer individually determines the number of times they play each phrase. They form a collective conductor yet also act as many conductors as the role is distributed among each of them.
Terry Riley’s “In C”
Bird Sounds in C proposes to create an orchestra of birds to play “In C”. For each bird, the phrases of “In C” are recomposed by alternating and arranging an individual “C note” extracted from their bird song. These phrases are then further composed by a single user who chooses when to advances each bird through the composition.
Constructing Sounds
Rather than starting with notation and then playing the written composition as a “live” performance, Bird Sounds in C instead starts with recorded sounds and reorders extracted elements to form the phrases of Riley’s “In C”. By using recorded bird songs—sounds with specific structure and meaning within their species—and recomposing them into a new composition, the sounds are given new meaning and recontextualized outside of “wildlife”.
The written score for “In C” appears monophonic, consisting of a single melody without chords or harmonies. However, through Riley’s intended method of performance, the various phrases and patterns overlap to create a densely layered and heterophonic texture.3
Reinterpreting this dense texturing, Birds in C instead uses the complex polyphonic sounds of bird songs. When visualized as sonograms, the layered frequencies of recorded bird songs are striking. 4
A Fox Sparrow’s Breeding Song (Source: The Bird Guide)
Using the sonogram as a visual artifact of the bird song, I identified a snippet which approximated “C” which I then transposed and arranged into Riley’s phrases. In this way, the translation of recorded sound to extracted and reordered elements attempts to use polyphonic sounds as monophonic approximations of single notes.
Bird Sounds Iteration-01
Click the circle to start and advance the bird sounds
Midi Sounds Iteration-01
Prior to working with bird sounds, I used midi to create the tones. One user controlled two “musicians” to advance through the piece using the keyboard. When purely using midi, the resulting audio was to distinguish into two “musicians”.
Questions of Playability
What is the allowable degree of asynchronization?
Does the computational aspect create a system which removes human variability (i.e. the code makes sure when a phrase is advanced, it comes in on the first beat of a bar – or does the musician need to keep track of this?
How much content from the original notation of the piece does the user need to know? What visual indicates are needed to make choices about when to advance one bird or another?
We often discuss the browsing the internet with language similarly used in descriptions of exploring physical space. We get lost in the links, we forget how we ended up somewhere, websites leave breadcrumbs behind in the form of cookies. While the browser history indicates a very linear sequence of the websites visited, I imagine my perusal of the internet more as a web: one link branches to three other links and from each of those I open up three, four, five more.
In translating my recent browsing history, I was curious about the possibilities of spatializing this archive; what is the benefit of space as opposed to a two-dimensional infographic? 5
The proposal is a light installation. A black room is lit only by a grid of constellations, each representing the time-relationships of websites visited in a single day. The room itself recedes and its hard edges dissolve in response to the “endlessness” of the internet. Furthermore, the spatialization and distribution of the lights into a grid removes the linear sequencing of the recorded web browsing. They form clusters and relationships, rather than a strict lineage. Lastly, through representing websites in space, how one “experiences” the story is a question of their body, and how they navigate within the physical space as opposed to an interaction of scrolling, clicking or typing.
Fine Details
I wrote an AppleScript to record when I opened a new link and when I closed a link. I also catalogued the URL and title of the webpage, but mainly used that for reference.
Through spatializing the data, I was less interested in the specific content as opposed to the opening and closing of tabs over time. I mapped the links in relation to when I opened my first tab of the day. Anything opened within 10 minutes of that formed the lowest ring. The second ring was then vertically located in relation to how much time had passed since that first link, and again cluster anything within 10 minutes beyond that.
Precedents
Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar conceives as time as a fifth dimension through which the bulk beings can communicate using gravity. Every moment in time — the past, present and future — are all accessible and manipulatable within the Tesseract. An article by Colossal discusses how the tesseract was constructed as a physical set with which the actors could interact rather than a digital effect added in post-production.
”I declare that the Library is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space…Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is un attain able.”
Yahoo Kusama’s Infinity Room
Image by Rebecca Alder http://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/photos/4623953/
