Below is a drawing showing the translation from music measures to facade panels.
The drawings below show the framework and the adjustments made to each element in response to each note placement and note duration.
We used the song "Skyfall" as our example facade. Below is a drawing showing the full song displayed on the facade of a building.
The idea for this facade system is that different songs can be interpreted and translated to facade panels so that one can order a facade that resembles a certain piece of music. i.e. a "Lord of the Rings" facade or a "Symphony no. 5" facade. The different songs would produce a different musical typography on the facade.
Below are process images of our most recent cast using this system. We also raised the string location on the framework to produce a cleaner edge condition.
The final cast result in the sun with shadow effects. The long duration note is the highest rod which produced the greatest shadow on the panel.
Wonderful post. You appear to have reached a new level of discipline and rigor. Work like this makes me think about what the class is actually about. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteClearly, your project is about the visualization of music. As such, I have only one point of criticism: I am not entirely sure that mapping the length of a note to the height of a rod is entirely correct. Certainly it's going in the right direction. But music is temporal. A note plays out along the time-axis of the sheet music. It rise and falls. Your "music machine" gives the sense that a note plays only at one point in time at varying intensities.
Another possiblity is to treat a note as a series of discreet intensities. Along the grid you've set up, a note plays out as a series of bolts with varying heights depending on the intensity at a given moment.
You have constructed a kind of music box which produces music in material. How can you make it play for all it's worth?
The photgraphs of the castings are beginning to be wonderful. Keep exploring.
What do light and shadow have to do with the music? Can they become a part of it?
Don't forget to show us how the full score would look. We discussed the system as an installation of panel at a train station. Take a stab at how that looks.
Here's a follow up comment/ revision to my previous comment.
ReplyDeleteI can see how your project isn't necessarily a "visualization of music" but rather a system to print actual sheet music in material using a fabric formwork system.
In that case, it isn't so much about showing the temporality of the music but rather to make the casting legible as sheet music. The depth of the rod mapping to the length of note makes total sense that way. The deeper the rod in the material, the more intense the shadow in sunlight. Sunlight and shadow helps to decode your materialized sheet music.
To test this, I would definitely put your castings side by side in one image with portions of sheet music and see if you've achieved legibility.
You might also try to do a larger portion of panels using n-Cloth and see if that works as well.
Why the heck did you choose Skyfall?
As you said, in your second post, our formwork acts as a Musical Topography Generator, that maps the sheet music onto geometry of the facade panel. So the wall would call for 'decoding the embedded song' . But it's interesting what you mentioned about the temporality of a note and how we can play with intensities. Maybe to have it more dynamic, each note has a pre and post effect on the panel before and after it. We'll try testing this and see if it creates more interesting topographies. Or maybe we can have some other parameter in our system, that caters to it...
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