Music installations – ‘Ant colony’

Here we show how data from one domain (i.e. literature) can be transformed into artifacts in other domains (i.e. sound).

Transformation of the chapter ‘Awakening’ from my book ‘Melodies of Creation’ to music. 

Transformation flow:

1. Convert the Word document containing the book, i.e. the chapter ‘Awakening’ into an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text and save it in a .txt file.

2. Using a simple GUI-based programme written in Java, read-in the newly created .txt file and convert it to the musical score in the so called Staccato format, used by the open source JFugue software, allowing one to program and play music in Java programming language.

Mapping scheme used in this particular installation (an extract from the Java code file):

Of course, there are as many different other mapping schemes as there are stars in this Universe – this being just one of them.

3. Using another simple player programme written in Java, play the musical score saved to a file.

4. To record the music being played I used Audacity, as there were problems with JFugue’s .wav output. The result might sound a bit ‘alien’ but I suppose that this is OK, as we are all aliens anyway :) .
Sample of the musical installation ‘Ant colony’ in MP3 format - link.

Page updated in August 2021