Dancing About Architecture

This piece was inspired by both the images and process of James Welling's photographic series entitled "Choreograph." In this sequence of photos, Welling depicts dancers collaged against the Brutalist buildings of Marcel Breuer. Welling's process for creating these photos was to use the red, green, and blue color channels to alter black and white photos, in essence manipulating the way the computer "sees" to build the composition. I decided to use a similar process in creating my piece. The juxtaposition of dancers against buildings made me think of the famous phrase "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." I began the piece by asking four different people with different vocal timbres to record themselves speaking this sentence. I took each audio recording and used the EQ in my DAW to separate out the high, mid, and low frequencies. I then used the computer to translate this audio into midi data, and the midi data into pitch and rhythm. This process was used to create all of the thematic melodic and rhythmic material found in the piece.