A piece of soundart that I'm trying to get exhibited/played somewhere this year, as it's partly to celebrate Louis Braille's bicentenary and his brilliant invention of Braille (which makes such a difference to blind and partially sighted people’s lives) – and partly to, well, experiment I suppose. I make all kinds of art, material to abstract - and it’s kind of an artist’s duty to experiment. I got all inspired about soundart after my recent trip to New Zealand – Christchurch Art Gallery’s Subsonic exhibition especially.
Blodeuwedd’s Song is my response to how to turn Braille into music. I allocated each dot of the Braille cell a different note of the pentatonic scale, and used a poem I had written about Blodeuwedd as the base. I then transcribed the poem into Braille, and spent about three days placing each note. So one letter in my transcribed version can be up to five notes played together: for variation I spaced them out a little, and lowered the octave of a few, when I felt the poem intensified emotion – so this is a mixture of aleatoric and chosen notes. The soundart is set against a backdrop of a busy woodland and a lone owl.
If you know of anyone/anywhere interested in exhibiting/playing this piece, please pass on my details – the stories of The Mabinogion are a passion of mine, and lots of my art is based on the tales. I’m currently knitting a human skin for Blodeuwedd’s brother Blodeuben, and am also currently making a film called The Birth of Blodeuben.
More information on Blodeuwedd here and here, some on Blodeuben here.
More on Christchurch gallery's subsonic exhibtion here.
More on Louis Braille bicentenary and RNIB's celebrations here.
Wednesday 18 March 2009
Podcast 4.0
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1 comment:
Lovely and haunting.
And thanks for the word aleatoric!
I've done things I think of as "chance poems,"now I might call them aleatoric. (I don't think the use is confined only to music, is it?)
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