stop translating, you fool
February 21, 2009
Today I’ve been trying to use the first three (or so) seconds of Für Elise as a base for a composition of reliëf and light in a facade. It’s based on the pitch and length of the individual notes. The facade is first devided into two, as the music is a pair of almost identical groups melodies. Each of those melodies consists of three parts: one string of short notes with a longer one, and two, again almost identical, smaller groups. Then, each part is devided again, so that every area is a representation of the length of an individual note. The reliëf is based on the pitch of the notes. A lower tone lays deeper into the facade, a higher tone jumps forward. The wall opposite to the composition emits light, so higher tones are brighter. The entire process is done a second time, with a slightly different division. The third one is the most literal of all.
The scenes where then rendered (in SketchUp, with Podium). The results is are interesting pictures, which otherwise don’t appear to have any relation with the music, except maybe the rhythm which is somewhat noticable.
So what do we learn from this? When one has the music, he might be able to recognise the link. Or he may not. Either way, it doesn’t really ad anything. It confirms that this (above) isn’t the way to approach this research.
I’ve been taking the recognisable part to literally. I don’t want to make architecture in which people feel ‘oh look, it’s like a sonate of Beethoven’. After all, baroque art and architecture don’t have such an explicit link either. What they have in common are the underlying principles.
So what I am looking for is not a translation, maybe not even an interpretation, but a way to extract those principles and based on those principles, create some architectural space. The link between the architecture and the music then won’t be as clear as I originally anticipated, but when compared to the same space based on other principles (different music) there should be a noticable difference.
