The brief for Task 6 is to create a musical interpretation of a painting of our choice, from the early 20th century.  I decided to look for a piece of cubist art, as I am particularly interested in this area of artwork. However, on looking for a picture to use, I came across the work of David Lewis Baker, and particularly his piece “Ocean 144″. Initially the painting caught my attention as, even without knowing the name of it, it was obviously a visual representation of the ocean/water, and this immediately started me to thinking about the sounds I could use to create a musical representation of this idea. However, upon studying the work further, it inspired me to consider the use of Max rather than Logic for this piece, making use of some of the Max objects in order to take advantage of the grid-like appearance of the painting. More importantly, I was intrigued as to whether I was capable of doing it.

The picture is made up of a 12 by 12 grid, and each individual square is both a picture in its own right as well as a small part of the whole painting. I decided to use this idea as the basis for my piece, make each square of the grid contain an individual sound, and playing these sounds together to create the piece.

To do this, I looked in to using the matrixctrl object in Max. This took alot of research, as I have never used this object before. However, after much work it became clear that it would be possible to import the painting into the matrixctrl object.

The matrixctrl object is then routed, and I have assigned a different sound or sample to each of the individual cells in the matrix (and therefore each of the individual squares in the painting). When one of the cells or squares is clicked, a particular sound file is loaded and played, and it loops until the cell is clicked again, when it stops. I have put up a couple of screen shots below of the various subpatches within the main patch.

At the moment, it is possible for the user to create their own interpretation of the painting by manually clicking on the squares in any order they choose, and there is also a random setting. However, I have developed some charts of how a painting could be read, and will upload these along with my finished patch soon.