Talk / Atrium · E14, 3rd floor
Concerto Gothic: A Visual and Sonic Interpolation of Gordon Parks' Musical Notations
With Deia Green@deiacionne
AtriumE14, 3rd floor · MIT Media Lab
Concerto Gothic is a web-based typography generator that houses a custom glyph alphabet and sound system derived from Gordon Parks' handwritten musical notations. Parks is known for photography, but he was also a composer, and his score annotations hold a visual language of their own. The project asks a question: if a creative language goes through transformation, is that preservation or deconstruction? I'll walk through how I studied Parks' notations, developed glyphs through the practice of Atypography, mapped each letter to a note in Tone.js, and shaped the result into a language anyone can write with. Attendees will leave with a way of thinking about translating another artist's creative language with care, along with the technical approach behind it. The project got support from Mario Sprouse, Parks' music supervisor of 20 years, and Justen Leroy, lead curator of CAAM's The Sound of Gordon Parks. Attendees will be able to try the generator live.
Concerto Gothic began with a single page of handwritten musical score annotations. These annotations were shorthand that only Gordon Parks could read. Slashes for beat counts, numbers for phrasing. This was a clear example of a unique creative language that belonged entirely to his compositional process. It was Instinctual, gestural.
The result is a three-stage translation. Handwritten annotations become a visual alphabet. The visual alphabet becomes a sonic system. And the user's input becomes a composition.
About the presenter
Deia Green is an Art & Cultural Technologist based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the founder of HYGSF?, a creative technology lab aimed to amplify cultural narratives through immersive and emerging technologies. She's built experiences with companies like Snapchat, Meta, Black Girls Code, and NASA.