Etude 1
Poets of Sound and Time
Poem 1: To Live in the Moment
Poem 2: Wait
Reflection
With poems, people are often trying to express something. The first theme that came to my mind is life style. Generally, there are three different types – live in the past, live in the future, and live in the moment. While the first two bring endless thoughts, the last one encourages people to focus on the current actions. "To Live in the Moment" depicts the progression from past to moment and from future to moment. Each stanza represents the vector of the last word in five bins. Both the melody and the timbre are encoded using the distribution of these bins. It is interesting that past and future are quite similar, both dominated by the fourth bin, whereas moment is expressed by the third and fourth bins almost equally. This pattern resembles my understanding towards their relations.
The second poem "Wait" is more about an ongoing life experience. Actually, a large portion of life is spent in just waiting in line somewhere, and it is nearly inevitable for people living in groups. This poem describes how people become more and more impatient along with the growing waiting time. Different from the first poem, "Wait" is interactive and asks for an input – how long have you been waiting? Based on this input, as the waiting time increases, the words turn to be more negative, the gaps become smaller and more irregular, and the sounds are played in a higher tempo with more minor scales.
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