Without any real plan, I created a “ground” for this composition by feeding a large format jpeg of the image into the Music In Image site and tweaking the chord/instrument controls as it recorded. The program read the background as a series of muted colours rather than plain white, which fed the concept for the next stage. This track was then speeded up to about half its length, treated heavily with reverb and Abstract Chamber to reduce it to an ambient drone and double tracked with the raw speeded instrument track at greatly reduced volume. This now represented the cream background of the painting with its minimalist coloured pixels.
Since there are twelve different symbols (representing serial tone?) in the painting, I decided to pick a random sound or note to represent each. Timing would be suggested by the nature of the symbol: double symbol = double time, empty symbol = stretch time and red = stretch time + effect. Of course, these were only suggestions and things changed – very arbitrarily – as the process continued. When I tried squeezing this grandiose notion into the timeframe, things got very messy and a lot of changes were made on the fly. Some of my hand-made noises were overlong, assembling the whole thing was laborious at first, and it turned out much longer than necessary. Then I discovered one was missing… I think. Oh well.
The title simply refers to the number of symbols in the painting. And, of course, the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything…
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Sight read a late-1940s painting by Argentine artist Lidy Prati as a graphically notated score.
This week’s project takes as its subject a painting recently posted by art critic Blake Gopnik. Seen here, it dates from around 1948, he writes, and is by the Argentine artist Lidy Prati (1921-2008). In his description, Gopnik references Piet Mondrian, whose music is often associated with musical scores. Both the grid-like structure of Prati’s piece and its title, “Serial Composition,” suggest it as the subject of sonic investigation. Gopnik connects the piece to computers: “[I]t speaks of a system that can generate them. Computers and their algorithms seem on this painting’s mind, at a moment when computers still filled entire rooms with vacuum tubes.” (Note that as I was researching this project I came across work by Marcelo Gutman, who has created colorful score tributes to Prati.)
These are the steps for this week’s project.
Step 1: View the circa-1948 painting “Serial Composition” by Lidy Prati at this URL:
http://blakegopnik.com/post/142806762364
Step 2: Consider it as a musical score. Think about the sort of musical composition that “Serial Composition” might be.
Step 3: Record yourself performing “Serial Composition” as a graphically notated musical score.
More on this 225th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Sight read a late-1940s painting by Argentine artist Lidy Prati as a graphically notated score”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0225/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
