density
February 19, 2009
I’ve read an interesting article about music and architecture. Iannis Xenakis was a composer as well as an architect, and experimented with numerical proportions in music and architecture. For the facade of the monastery of la Tourette he designed the glass panes in the facade. By using a set of window widths, he ran into a problem:
too limited a number of elements results in an arid and predictable composition, too many elements make it impossible to aesthetically control the resulting configurations.
…. he considered the problem on a more general level, above the individual elements, by replacing the concept of rhythm by that of density (in the ense of ‘number of events per time or length unit’). Rather than considering the individual distances between the upright casings, he now demarcated zones in the facade where a higher or lower number of casings per length unit would be rewuired and then decided how the transition between these two states would occur: fluently or abruptly. - Muecke, Resonance: Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture, p25-26
This compostion wasn’t directly related to a specific piece of music, but more to the underlying principles of composition of music and architecture. I will do a small test on what happens if I try to base it on a specific piece of music. (I probably won’t come anywhere near my research goal, but the idea of linking density to rhythm might prove useful)
