Numbers

August 2009 Peter Broderick - Numbers (mp3)

posted on Peter's flickr photostream:

"I wrote some numbers on a photo. I wanted to think of it as a musical score. I would be really happy if anyone and everyone would like to create something, anything (paintings, drawings, musics, photos, whatever!), inspired by this score. Please, if you feel like doing it, and you have the time, make something and email it to me (peter.broderick@yahoo.com).

Maybe you'd like to make a piece of music from it? Maybe first you would treat each number as a note in the D major scale. 1 = D, 2 = E, 3 = F#, etc. Then you might grab your violin and record each horizontal line of numbers separately, at different tempos. So each number corresponds to a note in the scale, but you might also decide that each number represents how many times you will play that given note. So when you see a 6, you would play a B, for six beats, and so on and so forth. Then once you finished recording those violins playing the different lines of numbers, you might take the different lines and randomly place them over the top of each other. After hearing that you'd probably decide your piece of music needs a little bit of low end. So you might take the first vertical line of numbers and make it a bass line, playing each note for one measure, in slow 4/4 time, over and over again. After recording that bass line on a bass guitar as well as piano, you might think about fading it up throughout the entire song. And finally, you might hear all that together and decide that it needs something else. Why not read aloud all the numbers over the top of the music?

If one were to try these things, it might end up sounding something like this"

This tracks has been released on Numbers - A Project By Peter Broderick