Melancholia

Melancholia (2024) is an intertextual multimedia composition for text, image, and electronic sound. It is an electronic poem that was inspired by a Bridges 2015 conference talk I attended in Baltimore by the English number theorist John Horton Conway. During the talk Conway extemporaneously discussed Dürer's magic square, an order 4 magic square with many special properties whose earliest known source is the German artist Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514). To bring this Renaissance engraving’s main character to life, I decided to create an adaptation of Integer Vitae (1617), a text by the English Renaissance composer, poet, and physician Thomas Campion.

Using Max-based granular synthesis techniques, I realized the of the adapted poem in the audio domain. The musical accompaniment is based on proportions solely derived from Dürer's square. Natural sounds, suggested by both the engraving and text, are pitch shifted and time stretched in a manner that interweaves equal tempered and just tunings based on the square's rows, columns, quadrants, and other symmetries. In the video, text, image, and sound are fused by mutual analogy using rhythmic and dynamic proportions derived from the Fibonacci sequence to create a non-narrative form that freely interprets the engraving's symbolic imagery.

Links

Campion, Integer Vitae – https://englishverse.com/poems/integer_vitae
Cycling '74, Max – https://cycling74.com/products/max
Foderaro, "Granular Synthesizer," in Amazing Max Stuff: Music and Visuals in Max/MSP – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRc5WfOZXC4kHmNVubXnEhyhdH42_rW-P

Panofsky, Erwin. 2006/1955. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. {GB}
Weisstein, "Dürer's Magic Square," from MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource – https://mathworld.wolfram.com/DuerersMagicSquare.html
________, "Fibonacci Number," from MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource – https://mathworld.wolfram.com/FibonacciNumber.html

Updated: March 4, 2026