Le Mythe de Sisyphe

Here's my latest sound design project. Have a listen to Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, then stick around for the explanation.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe

For this piece, I took Albert Camus' essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) in the original French and isolated all the letters that also represent musical notes (A-G). To make the chord progression that carries throughout the piece, I used only the first paragraph and determined the total number of letters in the words from which these letters came and translated them into musical intervals. For example:

"par" has one musical note, A. It also has three letters in it, so I made a chord with a root A and a third interval.

I did this for all the musical notes in the first paragraph and used whole notes for the chords.

Taking the second paragraph, I again isolated all the musical notes, then used the remaining non-musical letters to determine the rhythm of these notes. I counted the non-musical notes after each musical note and based on the number assigned the preceeding note either a whole(7+ non-musical intervening letters), half (5-6), quarter(3-4), eighth(1-2) or sixteenth(0) note rhythm. Here's an example:

The phrase "ce long" has three musical notes- C, E and G. The C has no non-musical letters between it and the next musical note E, so it gets a 16th note value. The E, on the other hand, has three non-musical letters between it and the G, so it would be given a quarter note vaue.

I repeated this process for the remaining pargraphs in the essay, and assigned intuitively each paragraph an instrument. I then staggered the instruments so they entered and exited in an acceptable fashion.

Finally, I concluded the piece with all instruments playing Albert Camus' signature, a chord composed of two As, a C, a B and an E.

A Flawed Call to Arms

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, Unite!

You "have nothing to lose." That's not enough to motivate me. "A world to win" is too abstract. Give me something tangible to gain.



Count me out. I prefer the status quo.

A 2 am rumination

In reading the Communist Manifesto, I'm coming away with one major thought. Too many of the authors' defenses hinge on "You fault us for wanting to do away with X? Well nine tenths of the population do not have X, so this is not a change," or "...X is a bourgeois-created illusion."

I want to tear apart this book and lay out all the arguments based on assumption and faulty logic. It makes me mad that a book like this changed the face of the world.

Here We Go Again

The fish laid eggs again. I didn't think any were viable at first, but second inspection showed me some have little baby fish growing in them. Get ready for round two...

A Writing Prompt

Taken from Dan Wiencek's "Thirteen Writing Prompts" on McSweeney's:


Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man's friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.

Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.


I found these to be worth sharing.

Original

Sound Time

Maybe it's the fact that I haven't slept more than 4 hours in the past two days, it's nearly 6 am and I'm hopped up on caffeine, but I'm really getting a kick out of the "songs" I did for my sound design class. We had to fiddle around with the es2 synthesizer in Logic and we weren't allowed to use anything else. Here's what I came up with. For some reason everything I do for this class is nonsensical, but I can't stop laughing (mostly at the Leprechaun Parade, put on headphones and close your eyes, you'll see what I'm talking about).

Theoretical Music
Parade of the Leprechauns
Crystalline Fructose

Oh, Christ.

x

happy bright and smily post.

i'm taking more requests for the future as well.