I went to see harry smith at the Whitney the other night. I love harry smith. I am not sure how I first heard about him, but I became obsessed with his collection of string figures and string figures in general and string figures as the first animations and string figures as stories and string figures as constellations.
Breath!
One of my favorite parts of the exhibition at the Whitney was sitting and listening to his folkway recordings and reading how he analyzed each song. I loved reading his taxonomies and classifications.
Harry Smith also created his own notation for music and dance.
Experiment
I decided lets see if chat can generate some notation for music. I picked my favorite hildegard von bingen and I picked a chant.
Create a diagram that is a form of notation that explores hidden and obscure features of a piece of music, be inspired by the notation of harry smith and john cage and others like this. for this example create a diagram notation for O Viridissima Vergo by Hildegard von bingen
I asked chat gpt to show various elemens of the music and chat wrote Certainly, you can create a more detailed graphical score notation to show repetition and other musical elements in “O Viridissima Virgo” by Hildegard von Bingen. Some musical concepts and elements you can represent in a graphical score notation include:
Repetition: You can use symbols or lines to indicate repeated musical phrases, motifs, or themes. For example, you might draw an arrow pointing to a section that is repeated.
Dynamics: Use symbols such as “p” for piano (soft) and “f” for forte (loud) to indicate changes in volume. Arrows can show crescendos and decrescendos.
Articulation: Markings like staccato (short and detached) or legato (smooth and connected) can be represented using different symbols.
Tempo Changes: Arrows can indicate changes in tempo, such as accelerando (getting faster) or ritardando (slowing down).
Key Changes: Mark key changes with key signatures or use different colors to represent different keys.
Time Signatures: Show changes in time signatures (e.g., 3/4 to 4/4) to represent rhythmic variations.
Instrumentation: Use symbols or text to represent which instruments or voices are playing at a given time.
Harmony: You can indicate harmonies by showing the relationships between different pitches in the same musical passage.
Melodic Contours: Use lines to show the rising and falling of melody lines.
Counterpoint: Show different melodic lines played simultaneously, emphasizing the polyphonic nature of the composition.
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (September 25 Version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com
I am sort of curious how music connects with the soma, with our breath and heart beat, with the sunlight, and the photosynthesis of the green plants.
