Women in Art, Literature, and Music
This is a project I recently completed for my Women in Art, Literature, and Music class. Throughout the course we talked about early feminist artists that explored what it means to be a woman. I wanted to create a piece that could go through the process of finding itself, and stay "feminine" in both form and content. This piece was made using a PureData patch I built last fall that plays sound clips randomly. I really wanted the computer to be composing the music because creation has always been associated with femininity, and by giving the computer/random chance the power to create the piece flows more organically than a straight composition. I chose to use words that I found in the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. The words I plucked from the pages have very strong emotional ties with first wave feminism, and also the struggle that the characters in the novel were going through as they tried to hold on to their traditional beliefs as they relocated to the U.S.
The sounds in this piece were made from recordings of the characters names in the book, text to speech software, and a bass guitar.
Computer Music
The creation of this piece was a lot different than anything that I had done previously, mainly because I was writing a computer program and not the piece itself. Jason and I wrote a program that would play a collection of sound-files pseudo-randomly. The process starts by writing a line of code for each sound file (about 115 total) to tell the computer a series of information and parameters. Heres a sample:
58, Bmote9 shotF 1005.51 1700 15000 50 50 20 30 80 90 Bmote9;
This line means that the following data pertains to the 58th sound-file in the folder, its name is Bmote9, it will play it foreward,it is 1005.51 milliseconds long, it will play again sometime between 1,700 and 15,000 milliseconds from the last time it was heard, and the other numbers affect things like reverb, spatialization, and volume.
Basically, it was my job to give the computer a set of parameters, and then the computer crunches the numbers and randomly plays the sound-file. As the piece is playing I can then choose which sound-files can be heard and which are muted. I am simply choosing the sounds are audible, but nothing else, this means that every time I run this program the computer creates a different piece of music than the time before. I recorded a 7 minute run-through to give you an idea of what this program sounds like while running.
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