Data noise #2

Liz K Miller, an artist, presented her project – the circular scores. She started this project in response to her musical interest to which she produced a new musical notation using the rhyming and pulsing pattern that had existed. Her intention for the project was to create a notation system that could be read, followed with someone not so familiar with traditional musical notational system.This project was iterated in 2008, it’s been on-going for 10 years. A quote she had mentioned in her presentation was:

“As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those that interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency… In  a chaos of shifting perceptions, each of us constructs a world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located in depth and have permanence.” Mary Douglass (1966:36) in Tim Ingold Perception of Environment ( 2000;158)

I believe this is a philosophical perspective of looking at music and how we interpret music. Miller recognised how music seduces us through repetitive patterns and she displayed this in circular notations.

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From my understanding, the way she has constructed this is by displaying the whole music notation onto one etching,  one circle and you would follow it clockwise. The radius is pitch, the circumference is time and the disc is volume.

This makes sense when listening to the song and you can kind of follow the pattern but the colours can be a bit distracting and confuse the user a bit. However, when asking Miller how she would like someone to use this she didn’t give me a clear answer of whether someone would use it as an alternative music sheet or as a piece of art. She’s leaving the user to interpret it and use it in their own way.