pearl, computer-generated soundfile (2000)

pearl takes its title from a painting in the Art Institute of Chicago, Tintoretto's Rape of Lucretia. The painter arrays the falling pearls of Lucretia's broken necklace in a striking fashion. Imagine that an x-axis is drawn from the top pearl to the bottom pearl. The intermediate pearls are arranged so that the distance between each increases from top to bottom; random variation is applied along both x- and y-axes. One pearl, sprung from the prevailing order, strays to a point between the victim's legs to suggest her violation. Now, it seems unlikely that pearls would actually fall this way. Still, it seems Tintoretto has recorded a physical truth based on observation, perhaps of something quite different from falling objects. That's fair: art is bound to transform nature. These ideas--ordered distribution with random variation (obviously, not the novelty it would have been in Tintoretto's day), and art as a reflection and transformation of nature--are mirrored in pearl.

pearl was synthesized on a Macintosh computer using Csound (Vercoe) and Soundhack (Erbe). Algorithmic score files for Csound were generated in Visual Basic.

Listen to an MP3 excerpt from pearl.

Listen to the entire work.