Five Movements on Mondrian

Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondrian (March 7, 1872-February 1, 1944) was a Dutch painter and an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied, and even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belie their apparent simplicity. He is best known for his non-representational paintings (which he called compositions), consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, or black, separated by thick, black, rectilinear lines. They are the result of a stylistic evolution that occurred over the course of nearly thirty years, and which continued beyond that point to the end of his life. (Wikipedia) In this work, I made careful approximations of five of Piet Mondrian's paintings on graph paper and used the dimensions of these graphs to determine rhythms and forms. The work was made almost entirely in Csound, with some extra editing and reverberation in Sound Forge. To emulate Mondrian's primary-color world, I used a limited palette of sounds: percussive hits (bass drum, tom, snare, music stand, iron rail), white noise, the buzz and pluck opcodes, and granular synthesis clouds made from the words "blue," "red," and "yellow," spoken by myself. (Adam Scott Neal)

Channel: Music
Uploaded: September 24, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Author: adamscottneal

Length: 06:30
Rating: 4.00
Views: 4413

Tags: animation  art  electroacoustic  mondrian  paintings  synthesis  

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