Synesthesia | Chris Culy

At various times I have tried my hand at converting images and text to music. Similar to my later Revisualizing the Visual work, the idea is to map aspects of pixels or characters to aspects of notes. The concept isn't mine — there is a whole genre of "synesthesia" (or "sonification") music , some of it relatively sophisticated. Back in 2007 I wrote my own, very Rube Golbergian, system based on very simple ideas about music. Some of the results are listenable, others, well ...

Music for Will

Will Leben is a good friend and has long encouraged my artistic interests. About the time I was working my system, he acquired Edgar Arceneaux's "Broken Sol", a sculpture based on a Sol Lewitt work, "Wall Drawing No. 295". Given that Arcenaux's piece is a recombination of Lewitt's, it seemed appropriate to recombine Arcenaux's piece (and Lewitt's), so I decided to use pictures of those works that Will provided as the starting points for these 5 pieces. In addition, to be a bit self-referential, I also took a message from Will in which he talked about my program and and turned that into a yet another, very different, piece.

Email from Will Leben, March 2007