Music Board

by Peter Weibel & Jens Barth

Music Board allows the user to define the relative order of notes and samples. The note material can be constantly reorganized by way of spatial manipulation. The App makes it possible to work with generative processes and interact with structuring methods in modern music without any expert knowledge. Johann Sebastian Bach began working with the mathematical possibilities for manipulating notational order as early as the sixteenth century. To play a melody forwards, backwards and as an inversion essentially amounts to a spatial operation. According to Clifford’s algebra, the material is changed by rotation on the vertical, horizontal or diagonal axis. Thus, by introducing material subdivisions a generative instrument is formed.

Music Board was developed in 2011 at the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media.

Video of an early protoype of Music Board, 2011

Exhibitions

Car Culture, Medien der Mobilität, ZKM, 2011-2012

Sound Art, Sound as a Medium of Art, ZKM, 2012

Speculum Artium, Trbovlje, Slovenia, 2012

Speaker @ Symposium Molecular Aesthetics, ZKM, 2011

Publications

Enzyklopädie der Medien, Bd.2: Musik und Medien
Vom Klang im technischen Zeitalter

Sound Art, Sound as a Medium of Art, 2019

Molecular Aesthetics, Peter Weibel and Ljiljana Fruk (Eds.), 2013