Martin Meinerz

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.

WomenProj