Creating musical scores from unconventional sources can be a challenge for even the most adept avant-gardist; John Cage famously used the ancient Chinese divination book the I Ching as a compositional tool and more recently Arturas Bumšteinas’s Lotto Beats applied musical rhythms to the numeric structure of Swedish lottery tickets. And now artist Blake Carrington has chosen to adapt something less randomized, and more tangible, into sound. In his project Cathedral Scan, he has been changing the precise planning and historical nuances of Gothic architecture into songs celebrating each individual space. The fact that he has chosen cathedrals as his sonorous focus not only adds depth to the organ-like sounds but also repurposes the structures’ famous acoustics for something quite interesting and unusual.The ongoing work aims to create audiovisual representations of the Gothic cathedral spaces they represent. The scans of the cathedrals work as musical maps that he then puts through a custom Max/MSP/Jitter patch, laptop and MIDI controllers to create open-ended scores. The use of the layered organ sounds, droning on in layers and textures, is heavily loaded with meaning known only to each individual audience member. Within the space it is created from, the music is played in real-time as the scans unfold on a large screen. The reverberations of the spaces only add to the effect and overall intensity of the enormous and resonating—yet never imposing—sound. The varying speeds of the projections sync with the music to create fluctuating polyrhythms and harmonies that work to create a depth that cannot be represented by the flat black and white plans.Originally designed for his MFA Thesis, the simplicity of the concept has carried it through to today due to the complexity of its realisation, able to adapt to several venues and not just of the European Gothic kind. His next venue will be the 1,200-year-old Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. He will be combining Cathedral Scan with his more recent and ongoing project Loci_, in which he uses audio field recordings to make digital images of a space.
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