My Sister-in-law recently posted a link to an interesting article. It is about “soundweaving”, which is taking patterns used in traditional folk embroidery and turning them into music. The artist in the article translates the design into laser-cut punch cards and then feeds them through a custom music box. You can read more about his experiments here .
After reading this, I started wondering what Zentangles would sound like if they were translated to music?
I digitize my Zentangles (turn them into computer files) so that I can post them here, on my blog. So I already have done the data conversion on them. The file is essentially a compressed grid of pixels and each pixel’s information about itself, such as color, vibrance, and transparencey, which could be visualized as a 3D mesh. If you would like more information about bitmapped images, here is a Beginners Guide to Bitmaps . Would it be possible to treat this information as if it was some kind of musical notation?
Sound is created by vibrations. When something vibrates, it causes waves in the air particles. These waves have a frequency and if the frequency is in a specific range, we hear a “sound”. If you would like more information about sound, in general, check out this article on explainthatstuff.com!
Since the image is on the computer, it made sense to me to use a computerized method to convert the image to sounds. After some searching, I found a javascript library called tone.js that I thought might work. You can check out some examples of what could be done with this library on it’s demo page . Warning: this page is interesting to play with and will eat up time without you realizing it! LOL!
Now that you’re back….
The tone.js library allowed me to set up synthesizers to output to a computer speaker, to create sound waves that you can hear. Here is the results of the first experiment, using the Zentangle that I posted last Friday . It has lots of variation and repetition, so hopefully it will produce an interesting sound!
For this experiment I am starting at an arbitrary location in the image and scanning 100 pixels to the right to get information to play 100 chords. Since I am considering each pixel as a bit, either on or off, I also scan down a few pixels in each column to get enough information to generate something interesting. For each of those 100 vertical columns of pixels I extract enough information to generate 3 different notes. I select these notes from along several octaves of the C-Major scale. In addition, to add fullness to the sound, I add a 4th note to each chord for base. The base line gives us something to listen to in case we are scanning a through a large area of the tangle with few variations. Now that I have 100 chords, I feed them to a 4-voice polysynthesizer at the rate of 3 beats per second.
Make sure your computer’s volume up, press the play button below the image and get ready to rock! Well, to listen, anyway! It’s not very long, but if you want to stop the music, just click on the stop button.
All of this didn’t really take that long to do. I saw the post about the soundweaving last Wednesday, Sept. 13. It did take a lot of trial and error over a few days. You are listening to music that is actually being produced right now, when you click the button, from the image you see above. It isn’t a pre-recorded “song”.
This is just the first step in being able to “hear” a Zentangle. Much more could be done with the data in the image. I’m thinking the entire image could be analyzed statistically and perhaps the density could help determine the timiming, or the style of tangles (curved or angular) could determine an instrument. Colored Zentangles would sound different from those done on Renaissance tiles. Even two different classic Zentangles would sound different from each other! I’m open to suggestions.
Eventually, I would like you to be able to listen to all of my Zentangles, and perhaps, even hear your own. What if there was a Zentangle “player” you could use?
I will be working on this project for some time and I will occasionally post my progress so that you can follow along.
If you have any questions, or comments, please be sure to check out my Facebook page: Tandika's Art .