Text Sonata
Monitor, speaker, power amplifier, video
Variable size
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Word - Music
I create this system of transferring English letters to music notes. I divided English letters into 4 groups —— A-G,H-N,O-U,V-Z —— so that they could correspond with the names of notes in music. In this way, any text could be written in letters from A-G, and can be rewritten into a piece of music.
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This system is like a set of coding symbols. Any words written in letters can be converted into musical notes, and a complete musical score can be compiled by assigning durations on the staves. The transformation makes language become the most direct auditory sense, crossing language barriers, and the most important thing is that musical scores can also be understood visually as a symbol. For audience, the mobilization of their experience of reading scores stimulates synaesthesia, and the diagrams of musical scores can remind them of the sound of the corresponding notes, so the sound already exists in the human mind invisibly.
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I chose a classic segment from William Borough's novel "Naked Lunch": a pair of influential brothers take over a restaurant and provide customers with poisonous and weird food, but the customers dare not resist because of the authority of the brothers. They were forced to eat the food according to the menu, and they were all poisoned to death in the end. The meaning of this menu is aggressive and destructive, representing the unusual experience of breaking away from everyday life. Starting from the symbolism of this menu, I converted it into a complete score.
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I played this score on the piano and had it recorded. So far, the destructive words have been transformed into a piece of music, and the audience is required to read the score, to imagine the sound based on their own experience, as the music was not played on site with the work. The placement of the music score on site also played the first step in building the situational space.
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I made four videos to present the relationship between the situation constructed by this piece of music and the physical behaviour reacted to it from different levels.
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In the videos, the sound itself does not appear directly, but is played instead through the external evidence of physical behaviour as showed in the videos. This is a re-evaluation of the score and performance. Through this indirect communication, the audience naturally mobilizes the synesthesia to imagine the sound when watching the score and physical behaviour, forming a personal and specialized sound field.
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