alphabet games is a collection of installation works exploring the musical and visual application of a series of experimental literary techniques pioneered in the writings of Georges Perec, Rimbaud, Jackson Mac Low, bpNichol and Harry Mathews. The works were premiered at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts at the University of Minnesota in 2010 and run in both standalone and interactive modes.
alphabet games :: Perec (2009)
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In 1981, George Perec, perhaps the most well known of the Oulipo writers composed his short poem "De la difficulté qu'il y a à imaginer une Cité idéale" ("On the Difficulty of Imagining an Ideal City"). Each line of the poem contains a subject which begins with consecutive letters of the alphabet. In this realization, the words of each line are displayed in succession at various points on the screen. Each point is also accompanied by a short tone of unvarying pitch. As the lines of the text are built, the observer is forced to read not only along, but through the text. This visual illusion is accompanied by the hocketing melodic phrases that occur through the rapid alternation of the various pitches.
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alphabet games :: Rimbaud (2009)
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In Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) written in 1871, unique colors are ascribed to each vowel. Using this poem as a generative source, the vowels create unfolding bands of colors and excite harmonic components of a fundamental tone although the color designations originally described by Rimbaud are modified to produce more interesting visual results. In generating the visual and sonic patterns, the lines of the poem may be “read” through linearly, or words may be randomly or manually chosen with each ordering creating its own distinctive visual and sonic textures.
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alphabet games :: Mac Low (2009)
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In this work, a grid is seeded with letters and words to create a variety of acrostic patterns. Successive letters of randomly seeded words are displayed in sequence with each letter accompanied by a short tone with a pitch determined by the letter displayed. Words can be randomly seeded or chosen by the user. The work is inspired by aleatoric techniques developed by the poet Jackson Mac Low particularly in his work 22 Light Poems.
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alphabet games :: bpNichol (2009)
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Canadian poet bpNichol was well known for his innovative and highly distinctive concrete poetry. In his poem “Horse Rider”, the words “horse”, “rider” and “trees” are assigned distinct colors and the letters gradually redistributed across the page from top to bottom. In this audio-visual interpretation of the poem, the letters of the three primary words, together with their distinctive colors, are distributed across different geometric shapes with the spatial position of the letters and the letters themselves mapped to notes of different pitch, amplitude and stereo position.
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alphabet games :: Mathews (2009)
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The Mathews Algorithm, devised by American poet Harry Mathews, is a combinatoric method used to generate new words from sets of preexisting words. As the individual letters of the sets are reordered, potentialities are explored and new words are created. Using a vocabulary of words taken from Mathew’s 1998 novel Tlooth, variations on the algorithm are explored in real-time creating unique word combinations and visual patterns. These reorderings are accompanied by sonic textures in which phase, considered akin to spatial displacement, becomes a primary compositional device.
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