ARTWORK

“Sheet Music for Blank Space” #01 STEVE REICH / COUNTERPOINT
2021

Projector, LED panel Program code

Every piece of music has a melody. Between the grains of sound making the melody, there is an infinite abyss of sound. The world of sound that exists between the grains and cannot be captured in a notation. The infinite world of sound existing between the grains is dynamically visualized by a digital program. The fluid marbling, like a metronome, has a constant velocity, but its scale and color keep changing. The mysterious patterns on the black screen are pieces of visualized music extracted through a specific program. There is no same shape in any music or repetition of any sound. This is a unique piece of sound, a world of sounds that have failed to become sound.

What He Made
 “Music for Margin” is a series of works by Seitaro Yamazaki, who launched the project to seek possibilities to express the relationship of “sound” and “(overlapping, folded, or blended) multiple time, existing within possibilities”.

 “Music for Margin #1” is a visual artwork developed on the same time axis as “Counterpoint”, four music pieces by Steve Reich. In this work, the center screen of the three screens represents the time axis, which Counterpoint presently follows, while the two screens on the left and the right represent the fragments of the tiniest time which “might have existed there”.

 The combination of “fragments of sound that might have existed” projected on the screens on two sides is programmed to complete one cycle exactly in 24 hours based on the clock within the computer running the program, which does not precisely match any of the apparent solar time, International Atomic Time, or Coordinated Universal Time.

Why He Made
Throughout his artistic career, Seitaro Yamazaki has pursued visualization of myriad “expressions that might have been possible or time that might have existed” but had “vanished away without being selected for some reasons”. Theoretically, however, these attempts are destined to end up in failure, because the “expression” or “time” that has been given a shape by Yamazaki inevitably becomes chosen and existing. Works by Seitaro Yamazaki are traces of myriad possibilities that are left through various measures in the destined failure.

 “Music for Margin #1” consists of the extracts of “fragments of sound that might have existed” and “realized sound” from the myriad sound creatable from the music sheet of “Counterpoint”, which are aligned within a single time axis. Through the compilation, we can experience Reich’s “Counterpoint” being realized here and now and the unrealized “Counterpoint” in the counterpoint structure of two time axes.

The two time axes featured here are somewhat like an illusion, like the time only existing in each digital devices we personally own, as they do not precisely match the flow of time, which the audience is presently in, or the celestial motions or the global time conceptually shared among the presently existing humans. This illusional time is a manifestation of a will of the one who expresses and at the same time proves the eternal mismatch between such manifestation and the great nature in its element.

How He Made
Using a JavaScript program, the work generates spectrograms of the sound source and magnifies their details to the limit. None of the generated figures have the same shape. These figures are picked up and projected on the side screens.

The central screen features figures generated from the sound of the currently playing music. Through the contrast with the microscopic figures projected on the side screens, each screen expresses “parts and the whole”.