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COMPOSERS AS GARDENERS (WIP)

A Generative Design

“How are the dimensions of auditory space defined? Given the containment of architecture, its articulation of a site and the tangible embodiment of its boundary conditions, visual space and the visual horizon represent our immersion in an environment.”

Ear Room is a book that explores an order of magnitude from the intimate scale of the ear to the architectural scale of the environments. The interpretations of composition and the relation of architecture (environment) with music notations are included in the book.
    The “Composers as Gardeners” project is a demonstration of how audiences explore while they position themselves as (1) architects (Iannis Xenakis), (2) gardeners (Brian Eno). Brian Eno argued that composers are more frequently ‘gardeners’ than ‘architects,’ while Iannis Xenakis had some thoughts and mathematics in composition.
    In these two-dimensional music sheets, sounds add to another dimension. Audiences could experience (1.a) a shape that can be drawn first and played later, (1.b) a sine wave oscillator with the cursor that controlling sounds’ frequency and amplitude, (2) music notations that related to architecture and environment, and (3) “prepared piano” with random sound while pressing “A–G.” After that, audiences could save the audio and replay it or print out the music sheet by pressing “P.” (Audiences could hover the “Instruction” navigation to view the instructions of keyboards.)
    I used processing and the minim sound library to animate the music sheets based on the cursor’s position. A sine wave oscillator was used to generate the synth sound. It connects to the concept of how composers position themselves in the whole social environment.

︎ Special thanks to advisor Roy Tatum.

2021





︎Motion Piece
















What is a Composer?












︎Iannis Xenakis


“A thinker and plastic artist who expresses himself through sound beings. These two realms probably cover his entire being.”





︎Brian Eno


My topic is the shift from ‘architect’ to ‘gardener’, where ‘architect’ stands for ‘someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made’, to ‘gardener’ standing for ‘someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up’.
I will argue that today’s composer are more frequently ‘gardeners’ than ‘architects’ and, further, that the ‘composer as architect’ metaphor was a transitory historical blip.”





︎Generative Posters






︎Related Project ︎︎︎

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