Hot Tuesday Linkage
Janacek would be proud. No, wait a sec, Janácek (check out the text decoration on that bad-boy… except the c doesn’t work properly. Darn.) would be proud. Someone (namely a dude called Ranjit) has a proposal for an installation piece which you can see in the following video:
installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.
It’s a robot which translates vocal patterns into musical sounds which it performs on a modified electric guitar and various pieces of percussion equipment. In the video linked above you can see how it interprets a brief scene from Citizen Kane. This is exactly the kind of thing that Janacek was into, apparently; trying to mimic the cadences of the human voice using instruments. Except without the electric guitar and microchips. Probably.
Additionally, reader Yvonne forwarded me a recent story about an attempt to geometrically visualize the structure of musical works. As regular readers are probably sick to death of hearing, I’m totally in love with the concept of theoretically-well-grounded visualization techniques. It’s a fairly holy grail. This press piece is tantalizingly light on exact details, but one of the most interesting tidbits for me was:
To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.
Which I’m a tad suspicious of due to the “certain extent”, and might just mean that they got some pretty pictures which sort of look similar, but could be really neat. If I feel brave enough I’ll try and dig up the actual paper sometime this week and wade through acres of musical and mathematical theory which I do not understand. I can pretend to though. I’m getting really good at that after four years in grad school.
Tags: classical music, janacek, visualization