Melancholia

Melancholia (2024) is a multimedia composition for text, image, and electronic sound on video. It was inspired by a Bridges 2015 conference talk I attended in Baltimore by the English number theorist John Horton Conway (1937-2020). In the talk, Conway discussed Dürer's magic square; a 4-by-4 magic square with many special properties, whose earliest known source is the German artist Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514). To bring the engraving’s main character to life, I adapted a poem by the English poet, composer, and physician Thomas Campion (1567-1620) titled Integer Vitae. The realization of the poem in the audio domain utilizes Max-based sampling, granular synthesis, pitch shifting, and time-stretching techniques. The electronic music is based on sonifications of Dürer's magic square; i.e., it interweaves equal tempered and just mappings of the magic square's rows, columns, quadrants, and other symmetries into the pitch domain using natural sound samples suggested by the image and poem which are fused by mutual analogy in the video using rhythmic proportions derived from the Fibonacci sequence.

Links

Campion, Integer Vitae – https://englishverse.com/poems/integer_vitae
Cycling '74, Max – https://cycling74.com/products/max
Foderaro, "Granular Synthesizer," in Amazing Max Stuff: Music and Visuals in Max/MSP – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRc5WfOZXC4kHmNVubXnEhyhdH42_rW-P

Weisstein, "Dürer's Magic Square," from MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource – https://mathworld.wolfram.com/DuerersMagicSquare.html

Wikipedia, John Horton Conway – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway

Wikipedia, Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I

Wikipedia, Fibonacci sequence – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence

Wikipedia, Magic square – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square

Wikipedia, Thomas Campion (1567-1620) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Campion

Updated: August 17, 2024