Class 3 Midterm progress

Since class 2 after I settled with my final thesis concept. I started doing more in-depth research that diverged to two parallel paths: going through and understanding different compositional methods, rules in a variety of serial music, as well as looking at different graphic scores/notation systems to draw inspiration from musical expressions in physical/geometric space. Since almost all of these graphic scores are in 2D space, I have been thinking a lot about the 3rd dimension, which would add more spatial characteristics to the original music composition as well as its visual representation, be it viewer’s physical interaction, or sculptural materials, or spatial sound.

For now, I have decided on three topics that would each be represented in my three sculptural forms.

Form I. - Musical score as topological space

Form II. - Musical timbre as physical texture

Form III. - Musical sections as modular pieces

For the past two weeks I have been working on the first form. The first form is an investigation of Bach’s Canon 5 from BWV 1087. The four measures excerpt from the top two voices has glide-reflection symmetry. Any periodic text with glide-reflection symmetry can be encoded on a Möbius strip. I’m really fascinated by this property of the score and decide to represent it with a Mobius strip piano roll. I also wrote my own 4 measure music that emulates this composition method after consulting my undergraduate music theory professor, and I’m going to use my own composition for the sculpture.

excerpt from Bach’s Canon 5 from BWV 1087

excerpt from Bach’s Canon 5 from BWV 1087

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I modeled different variations of the mobius strip in Blender and 3D printed them.

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For the AR proportion, I used Vuforia’s Model Target Generator to train a database of the CAD model against all color background and lighting conditions for 360 recognition and tracking in Unity, but the result is still not that desirable given the uniform surface and color and partially symmetrical shape and my object having not many complicated details. I will keep experiment with the model’s color/texture/shape and scale to achieve more accuracy in detection.

I was imagining the animation in AR would have a playhead cruising along all sides(top bottom inside outside) of the mobius strip, triggering the notes when it passes them. So I used an occlusion model with a depth mask shader sitting exactly where the detected model target is, the occlusion model appears to be transparent but prevent virtual content behind the physical object to be rendered on top of it.

The second form is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg - The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. In the Third Movement, "Farben", “harmonic and melodic motion is restricted, in order to focus attention on timbral and textural elements. Schoenberg removed all traditional motivic associations from this piece, that it is generated from a single harmony: C-G♯-B-E-A (the Farben chord), found in a number of chromatically altered derivatives), and is scored for a kaleidoscopically rotating array of instrumental colors“(Wikipedia). I thought it would be interesting to create a physical form that constitutes different materials that represent different musical timbre.

The third form I plan to explore chance operations, a composing technique favored by legend John Cage. In Solo for Piano, Cage created 62 pages in total, but players were encouraged to change the composition around. In his Music of Changes, the process of composition involved applying decisions made using the I Ching. I have also explored randomness and chance in my performance Sonic Cubes last year. I might reiterate on some aspects of that performance to include it as the third form.

Currently, I’m also talking to some very talented composers/musicians to potentially collaborate with them on the second and third form.