NotesArt Studio

translating music into visual art

His drawing of Metastaseis is very different from my rendition, but this is to be expected since my algorithm is not truly an inverse function.

Xenakis' drawing of Metastaseis

Xenakis' drawing of a different piece, Pithoprakta:

However, with different parameter settings, my algorithm can draw the following rendition of Metastaseis, which starts to look more like Xenakis' drawings above:

This image bears some similarity with my first rendition of Metastaseis.

10.Oct.2013: Harn Museum

Inverse in Place (2013), Tim Davis

This artwork is the result of a mathematical algorithm that converts an entire piece of music from its natural domain of time and frequency into a domain of space and color, relying on Fourier transforms, graph theory, sparse matrix methods, and force-directed graph visualization. Inverse in Place is a translation of Metastaseis (a state of stasis) by Iannis Xenakis, a composer and architect who translated his architectural thoughts of space and structure into music, relying heavily on mathematics and algorithms.  In his preliminary sketches for Metastaseis, lines and their intersection in space form hyperbolic paraboloids, which he translated into musical notes and chords. Xenakis described his process as "vision -> rules -> works of art." He describes an inverse path as "rules -> vision." This piece completes Xenakis' inverse path by using algorithms to create visual artwork from his music.