Marty Quinn: Word, Music, Rhythm, and Geometry: How Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Became a Song

Art and NKS lecture series

Marty Quinn discusses and demonstrates his work in the sonification of Greenland's ice and Shakespeare's prose

In Marty's work to sonify Shakespeare, he defines many mappings:

• The letters of the alphabet map to notes
• The actor speaking defines the scale used
• Punctuation translates into percussion
• The position of a letter in the word maps to an instrument

Various translations can then be applied. For example, if each word is allotted the same amount of time, the syllables of a word effectively yield a rhythm. Alternately, each word can be treated like a chord.

After hearing the musicality of the resulting composition based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, guitarist Pat Martino agreed to record a jazz track, with Marty playing percussion.