bag in a tree: November 2008

Monday, November 17, 2008

filed under the category of conceptual work that i’ve been thinking about for a long time, but have recently rethought

saw this the other day on ffffound

A number of years ago I thought about taking the college hoops scores — published in agate in the sports section — and turning the page sideways to superimpose a music staff over the scores. Where the scores meet the staff a note would be placed. The process would encompass the whole season, with each day equaling one measure and it would be purely percussive.

Last May I read an article in the New Yorker entitled Letter from Alaska: Song of the Earth about American composer John Luther Adams and a piece of work he created based on real time “information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.”

This sounded really great, since I’ve always been partial to new approaches to music. For myself, like Mr. Adams (and this is where the similarity ends), it started with Zappa (but for me it was “Absolutely Free”), then it was Satie and Milhaud, then Partch (wish his “Castor and Pollux” was on iTunes), Cage, ECM artists like Marion Brown and Azimuth, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Carl Stallings, Steve Reich and the list goes on.

Their exploration of music is why I now gravitate toward listening to world music ... so many approaches and varieties of sound that are way more interesting to me than most popular music except Tom Waits and Beck.

And just the other day I found sniff_jazzbox, a free iPhone app that converts wlan-waves into sound waves, so with wi-fi enabled, you can ride the bus or walk through your neighbor and let the app find all the hotspots and convert them to music. Within the app there is the ability to change instruments and the speed at which each instrument is played. There are also themes that have preset instrument groupings. You can find out more about it here. It is a great idea and provides another interesting approach to music.

Anyway, back to the New Yorker article. When Mr. Adams spoke of flying out of Alaska and his love of the geography, the place, I started thinking about converting topography into sound. While I’ve produced innumerable Tour de France, Giro and Vuelta stage profiles in the past, the thought had never occurred of taking a profile of the land and superimposing it onto a music staff until reading the article.

Here are the basic thoughts ... if anyone out there knows of something like this already in existence, please let me know.

The profiles I’ve done are crude, elevation increments of 500 feet. Better geographic data and plotting could help determine where the notes are placed based on the interaction of the profile and the staff. In other words, a note could be placed at every five or ten feet of vertical elevation change, or a note could be placed where the intersection occurs every five or ten feet horizontally.

Measures could be based on geography as well, through x number of miles from the locus — either equidistant or logarithmically. Movements could be going to or from the center. Additional cardinal points could also come into play.