Transliteration Series

(2017, ongoing)
The transliteration series contemplates the notions of “score” within the world of contemporary music.

As digital media plays an increasingly larger role in contemporary composition and performance, many of the aesthetic choices made by composers are not evidenced in a traditional score document, but are stored and subsequently performed through other means, often digital audio, digital video, computer code, or notation idiosyncratic to these media (Csound score documents, foot pedal cues, signal flow diagrams, etc).

Most compositional processes take sounds from a composer’s imagination and transliterates them to a score document, which is then filtered through a performer and transliterated to sound. The lossy process of transferring data in this way leads to a (sometimes desirable) gap between a composer’s imagination and the final sounding result.

This project inverts part of this transferral process, yet (necessarily) maintains the inaccuracies of the transliteration. The short compositions (between 1 and 30 seconds) used as source material were created digitally using recorded and/or synthesized sound. This final sounding result is then transliterated to a visual medium (i.e., score), which will likely involve certain quantization errors. The resulting score document is created with a degree of precision such that one could scan the visual media and reconstruct the original audio information (very likely with a degree of error, just like extracting sound from a traditional score). This offers digital media a similar lossy process (called a “score”) by which to transform and obtain artifacts of transliteration.