Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Synesthesia factor week 10
Move of the week: Unbreakable
Literature of the week: Resonance (Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture)
Deconstructing Music
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.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Pachelbel's Canon in Dmaj Second Batch of Animations
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Synesthesia factor week 9
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thesis site: Mamluk Cairo
The above diagram is a plan of Mamluk Cairo as it stands in the beginning of the 21st century, compiled from Nicholas Warner's Monument of Historic Cairo .
The above diagram highlights major traffic axis within the city, creating a distinction between pedestrian and automobile traffic. It should be noted that although el Mu'izz street is highlighted as autombile street, automobile access is highly regulated and considered very light to make it more pedestrian friendly.
The next diagram highlights the various building types and uses within the historic city. It should be noted that the diagram is incomplete; it was compiled by limited amount of information that I have, and will be added onto within this thesis year. Purple marks the Relgious use, Green the leisure use, Blue the educational use, Brown the municipal / defense use, and Red marks the commercial use. The uncolored buildings are meant to be residential use at this point.
The above series distuingshes between the various time periods where the buildings were erected. Starting with the Fatimid Period (969-1174), the Ayubbid Period (1174-1257), the Bahri Mamluk period (1257-1392), the Circassin Mamluk period (1392-1517), the Ottoman period (1517-1805), the Mohamed Ali period (1805-1956), and the Post-Revolution period (1956-present). The monuments highlighted in bright blue depicts the Fatimid Period, while the bright orange depicts the Post-Revolution period.
The next two diagrams deal with acoustic space. It was mentioned that Cairo was planned out so that each individual house would be in hearing reach to the mosque's call to prayer. This diagram tests this claim. The small orange dots marks the spot of the minarets within the city, while the large faded yellow circles maps out the threshold of where the call to prayer would be hold, meaning anything outside that circle wont hear the mosque's call to prayer. The diagram was based on a simple physics equation on the intensity of sound: each time the distance is doubled, the intensity level is divided by four. Knowing that any sound made by a human being can not exceed 80dB (without amplification), the outer large circle mark the point where the sound has reached 20dB (audible whisper).
Interestingly enough, there were a few patches of space that are not within audible reach to the call to prayer. At first, I was disapointed that the theory would therefore by false. However, if you look closely to the map, you would notice that the eastern area is a post revolution grid addition to the city, near the southwestern corner is a Mohamed Ali extention (emulating Hausmann's Paris), and the western part of the city includes a number of Synogoges, which leads me to believe that the area was Cairo's Jewish quarters.
The following diagram is similar to the one before, but it focuses more on the intensity of the mosque clusters. Notice how the cluster is intensified arround both the Qalawun / Barquq complex and arround the Rifa'i / Sultan Hassan mosques near the citadel.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Mahmoud Riad's Cairo
On a recent trip back home to Cairo, I was engaged in conversation with a few relatives over the course of a welcome back dinner party. We were talking about specific developments that have been going around the country that they particularly found charming. Over the past decade or so, the image of the american suburb has been adopted by Egyptian developers, and planted on the outskirts of Cairo, with the intent of boosting up land value of the untouched desert surrounding the capital. A novel idea, since Cairo has been suffering from intense overcrowding density, the city of opportunities for many Egyptians. I believe that the statistic at the time was that 96% of the population was living in 2% of Egypt's land, mainly the nile banks and delta. So creating satellite cities seemed like the way to go to solve this problem.
I digress...At the dinner, a phrase was used to describe one of these developments that really intrigued me, "it has become such a beautiful place, you don't feel that you are in Egypt." It took a few seconds for me to comprehend the gravity of such a phrase. Since when have the criteria for something being successful or beautiful been disassociating it with the surrounding context? Have we (Egyptians) become so ashamed of our country, our culture, our heritage, and ourselves that we feel the need to be identified as something other?
Unfortunately, there is a general sentiment in Egypt that whatever looks or sounds western is considered beautiful. Arabic pop music attempts to mesh arabic singing (using different musical scales and maqams) onto generic western chord progressions and western pop beats. I always felt a disconnect between both, since arabic musical scales would often create slight cacophony when played on western chords (arabic music itself is not based on chords but on heterophony). Even our food is becoming more and more of a copy of other culture's cuisines. Homes now pride themselves in cooking Italian, Chinese, American...etc. It seems Ironic that restaurant moguls are now selling our cuisine back to us, marketing that the menu is composed of "home style Egyptian cooking", overcharging tens of times more than the original cost. It just doesn't make sense to me.
While cross cultural exchange has been around for centuries, the concept of complete westernization is relatively new. Many scholars attribute the initiation to Mohamed Ali's rule in the 19th century. Coming out of a cultural recession and an invasion by France, Egypt was in dire need of a paradigm shift, a boost in the country's cultural richness. Europe has just been experiencing it's own paradigm shift with the Industrial Revolution, so Mohamed Ali thought that a cultural exchange between Egypt and Europe would benefit the country. He started sending many young scholars to continue their education and be exposed to what he thought was a superior region. While some of these scholars came back preaching ideas that helped solve some of the issues lingering in society (Kassim Amin and his ideas of the liberation of women, and Mohamed Abdo's message of tolerance and compassion in religion), others started to apply European concepts without thinking about the consequences. The creation of Downtown Cairo, although is now considered one of Cairo's cultural hotspots, is an example of such. Taken after Hausmann's model of Paris is 1850, the downtown area (West el Balad) was designed to house Neoclassical and Baroque style buildings, where architects all-over Europe jumped at the chance to design in a foreign country with no obligation to respond to contextual buildings.
One of the fundamental ideas of Islamic Cairo is the creation of the inward centered street wall, where the entire street, including the facades of the buildings, becomes public property, and you can't tell where one building ended and the other started. You could not tell the rich man's house and the lesser fortunate one's house apart, as they all belonged to the same street wall. Houses faced an interior courtyard, where each could lavishly decorate according to their financial means. This created a block where the rich and poor can live side by side on the same block, where they are rendered equal outside between the street walls, praying side by side in the mosque. By creating these new european model cities, the rich (who are the only ones who can afford these lavishly decorated baroque buildings) moved out, leaving the poor behind in abandonment, creating, what Galal Amin would call, a social mobility shift, and a tension between the two classes that would continue to grow and intensify as time goes by.
Such effects of globalization, I feel, are much more serious than just the mere image of it that we are reacting against. In Soundscape, R. Murray Schaffer makes an argument suggesting that the drastic conditions of traffic in third world countries are a product of such effects of globalization. Europe, having gone through the whole Industrial and Electrical Revolution, are accustomed to the stop-go mentality of the conveyor belt. He states that those in the third world, having not gone through the whole industrial revolution process from the beginning, are still treating their cars as horse carriages, attempting to finesse their way through traffic, rather than traveling in one lane abiding by traffic regulations. If this is infact the case, then such cultural exchange should be examined carefully before enforcing it to a region.
However, I am not advocating against cross cultural exchange and interchange. The most exciting works of art and inventions have come through a marriage of two elements that has been unprecedented. Oriental jazz brings an exotic blend between arabic musical scales and rhythms while being played under western "jazz" chords and western instruments. Yet here a high level of proficiency in both musical styles independently is need here to be able to identify where such a rub between the two could happen and when would it be highly distorted. I firmly believe that rules are made to be broken, but a conscious breaking of such rules to highlight a specific condition would yield a more powerful result than an breaking of such rules due to general ignorance or negligence.
Which brings me back full circle. Egypt, just like any other place in God's world, is a distinct place. It seems to me, that an indepth study of the characteristics of this place is imperative and unavoidable before designing or composing anything that has to do with the country. Each place has different sensory characteristics, whether its what you see in the urban and rural landscape, what you hear in the soundscape and regions music and language, what you smell in the odors, what you taste in the food, or what you touch in the ground, water, or air. Understand that, you understand the place, and you appreciate the place.
