Melancholia

Melancholia (2024) is a multimedia composition for text, image, and electronic sound. It was inspired by a Bridges 2015 conference talk by the English number theorist John Horton Conway (1937-2020) that the composer attended in Baltimore, MD. Conway discussed Dürer's magic square, an order 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, the composer adapted a poem titled Integer Vitae by the English poet, composer, and physician Thomas Campion (1567-1620). The realization of the poem in the audio domain utilizes Max-based granular synthesis techniques. The electronic music is based on sonifications of Dürer's magic square. Natural sounds suggested by the engraving and poem are pitch shifted and time stretched in a manner that interweaves equal tempered and just mappings of the magic square's rows, columns, quadrants, and other symmetries into the pitch domain. Text, image, and sound are fused by mutual analogy in the video using rhythmic and dynamic 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

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

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

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

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

Updated: November 13, 2024