deconstructing Music pt 3: deconstructing pachelbel's canon in Dmaj

finally I've been able to finish this!! The following two animations is attempting to address (or deconstruct) the experiential / sequential quality of the musical edifice.

Synesthesia factor week 12

Music of the week: Arabian Waltz (Rabih Abou Khalil)

Movie of the week: True Lies

Literature of the week: Music of the Arabs  (Habib Hassan Touma)

Color of the week: Crimson Red

Taste in mouth of the week: nice juicy burger

Smell of the week: the wax from my prismacolor pencils

Touch of the week: tracing paper

Synesthesia factor of the week: Hearing about different illnesses and pain makes me feel slight pain in the area described (sympathy pain?) .

Moud of the week: focused

Inspirational Quote of the week:

"To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first."

-Shakespear

Synesthesia factor week 11

Music of the week: No me No you (Frost)
Movie of the week: Quantum of Solace (especially the Tosca scene)
Literature of the week: Urban Diaries (Walter Hood); Building for cities, the Architecture of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti (Peter G. Rowe)
Color of the week: Apple Green
Taste in mouth of the week: Green Tea
Smell of the week: Green Tea
Touch of the week: leaves
Synesthesia factor of the week: Sounds of the city start to emerge into musical sounds in my head.
Moud of the week: un-sane

Inspirational Quote of the week:
"If you try to take a cat apart, to see how it works, what you have in your hands, is a non-working cat."
- Frameshift

Deconstructing Music pt 2

Synesthesia factor week 10

Music of the week: Devour (Shinedown)
Move of the week: Unbreakable
Literature of the week: Resonance (Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture)

Color of the week: Lilac

Taste in mouth of the week: Pepper

Smell of the week: Pepper

Touch of the week: mouse buttons

Synesthesia factor of the week:  www.synesthete.org

Moud of the week: slightly energized

Inspirational Quote of the week:

"If you aim for the stars, you might land on the moon"

- someone at some point in my life

Deconstructing Music

deconstruct |ˌdēkənˈstrəkt|

verb [ trans. ]
analyze (a text or a linguistic or conceptual system) by deconstruction, typically in order to expose its hidden internal assumptions and contradictions and subvert its apparent significance or unity.


"You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.

But suddenly, you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." That is architecture. Art enters in.

My house is practical. I thank you, as I might thank Railway engineers, or the Telephone service. You have not touched my heart.

But suppose that walls rise toward heaven in such a way that I am moved. I perceive your intentions. Your mood has been gentle, brutal, charming, or noble. The stones you have erected tell me so. You fix me to the place and my eyes regard it. They behold something which expresses a thought. A thought which reveals itself without wood or sound, but solely by means of shapes which stand in a certain relationship to one another. These shapes are such that they are clearly revealed in a light. The relationships between them have not necessarily any reference to what is practical or descriptive. They are a mathematical creation of our mind. They are the language of Architecture. By the use of raw materials and starting from conditions more or less utilitarian, you have established certain relationships which have aroused my emotions. This is Architecture."
- Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture 1927

The technical aspect of any kind or art, wether its painting, composition, architecture, or even sport, will only take you so far to create something that others may call art. There is this hidden quality that differentiates drawing from painting, muzak from music, building from architecture, or aerobics from sport.  A musician once told me that this hidden quality is attitude, two soloist can play the same exact musical phrase, but one possesses a certain "emph" in his playing, maybe using dynamics to accentuate some notes from the rest, allowing the phrase to be much more rhythmic than it actually is, while the other player, but not adding anything to the mix, is just reciting a bland musical phrase. Even if two gifted soloists play the same phrase, each with the right amount of attitude, the outcomes would be entirely different, as each would perform the phrase to reflect their own soul. That's why ever time you hear tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by a different orchestra and conductor it sounds slightly different.

The question becomes, staring from conditions more or less utilitarian, how do you turn lines, colors, and shapes into art; notes, chords, and rhythm into music; structure, material, and space into architecture; dribbling, kicking, and passing into sport. My thought is that there should always be an intent towards a work of art, even if the intent is to capture specific moods or spontaneity of the artist at that specific moment. A narrative or overriding story (or plan of attack in sports) that is not explicitly spelled out within the work of art, but could be understood through cycles of deconstruction. A level of abstraction is need to break the tangible artifact from its bonds of reality (from the frame off the wall) into a realm of conceptualization. It is then when you can start to translate, or transpose, one work of art into another.

Deconstruction is often mistaken for Synesthesia. The main difference between both is while Synesthesia may be post-rationalized (depending on the level of Synesthesia, the direct levels often could not be post-rationalized), it never is pre-rationalized. Deconstruction entails a 

preemptive analysis of the subject matter, which means a certain degree of intellectualization is needed at the beginning, as opposed to the sensory reflex action of Synesthesia. That is why many believe that artists like Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Scriabin are not Synesthetes as had been previously noted, but are Pseudo-Synesthetes, those who rely on association and memory rathen than the sensory reflex action of Synesthesia. In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky discusses how musical ideas have influenced his art, specifically mentioning his painting Little Dream In Red. He discusses how dynamics and sounds of musical instruments influences his choice of line weight and color. Although this is very much akin to a synesthete's perspective, Kandinsky states that although some of his correspondences are founded upon his own personal "feelings", others are founded upon cultural biases and mysticism.

Schematization of the correspondences between colors and musical timbres according to Kandinsky:

Colors   Musical timbres Yellow   Trumpet; Sound of the fanfare Azure   Flute Blue   Deep sounds from the organ Dark blue   Cello Very dark blue   Bass Green   Middle tones of the violin White   Temporary pause Black   Conclusive pause Grey   Lack of sound Bright red   Fanfare; Tuba/Horn Crimson red   Drum-roll; Tuba/Horn Cool red   Medium and deep tones of the cello Bright cool red   Other tones of the violin Orange   Middle bells of the church; Strong cantralto voice; Viola Violet   English horn; Bagpipe Deep purple   Deep tones of the woodwinds; Bassoon

There is more to these correspondences than just these Synesthestic reflexes. Some architects took specific events within a musical edifice and used that to as a conceptual bias for their architecture. Steven Holl used Bella Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta as his inspiration for the Stretto House, "(the edifice) has a materiality in instrumentation which the architecture approaches in light and space." Both the piece and the building are formed in four sections, consisting of two modes: heavy orthogonal masonry representing the percussion, and light curvilinear metal roofing representing the strings. 

Daniel Libeskind drew inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He was particularly interested in the sudden break of the music in the third act of the operetta, after two acts of fairly complex music, the music abruptly stops in the second act, allowing the silence to act as a figural element just as the music. Libeskind goes on to say that the unwritten third act is actually one of silence, allowing sounds from the audience to come into play. Whether Schoenberg actually intended that is highly questionable, but his contemporary John Cage "composed" 4'33'' based on that idea; not letting the musicians play their instruments for 4 and a half minutes, allowing the sounds from the audience to compose itself into the piece. Libeskind says that his "void" spaces within the museum are placed to achieve the same effect; a disorienting phase to allow the visitor to become a participant in a space allowing contemplation and reflection.

How people dance and sway to rhythm is subjective, but they do move to it nonetheless. The following series of exercises, done in Professor Michael Ambrose's ARCH670 class at the University of Maryland, attempts to deconstruct Extreme's "Get the Funk out". The song is an upbeat catchy, funk-rock/funk-metal tune. The objective of the project was to deconstruct the rhythmic sensations of the song. I asked former tap dancing state champion, Martiena Schneller, to improvise a routine for the song, and I analyzed her body movement accordingly. 

Pachelbel's Canon in Dmaj Second Batch of Animations

This is a followup to a recent post. The next two animations are different variations of their predecessors. Both deal with Rhythm as the form generator. The reason why this particular piece was chosen was that it could be read as layering of music, with each chord progression, another variation or layer of music is added to the loop. The previous animations had the new theme added to the outer edge of the animations, so it never is highlighted, while the very first theme is always in focus. These next two flip it around, making the new theme the one in focus, and the older themes pushed away (which is more true to the edifice as opposed to the older versions).

Synesthesia factor week 9

Music of the week: The Perfect Element (Pain of Salvation)

Movie of the week: Memento

Literature of the week: In the Place of Sound: Architecture | Music | Acoustics

Color of the week: indigo blue

Taste in mouth of the week: cough drops

smell of the week: cough drops

Touch of the week: cotton

Synesthesia factor of the week: As I walk home, listening to my ipod, each song makes me notice specific colors in the atmosphere / landscape. The highlighted colors paints a different hue over my eyes, making me experience and see things differently with each piece of music.

Moud of the week: numb

Inspirational Quote of the week:

"if you take from those you fear everything they value, then you have bred the perfect beast, drained enough to kill you." 

- Daniel Gildenlow