Music for My Eyes

As for the strict visual aspects—the poster itself—, this is not my work. For the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, the “MATT” (Society of Hungarian Graphic Designers and Typographers) announced a contest in November 2011. The name “Zene szemeimnek” (Music for My Eyes) referred to the visual projection of an audible subject, targeting the musical affinity of the design community. I contributed to the event through the coding process of the finally award winning work by Péter Serfőző, one of my friends. The idea—visualizing a MIDI data sheet with some of the composer’s pieces—was not far from my world, as this was one of the tasks I could call pure generative art. Taken the XML file, I first jumped into the deep water of the MIDI standard (which is sometimes rather a recommendation), then picked the values I considered relevant, and put them into variables. The algorithm was based on these nodes, and was meant to create relatively simple, but a large amount of patterns at once. The tiny changes in the source numbers resulted in huge differences on the final composition. At the end of the programming I gave only the code (enhanced with detailed comment lines) and instructions—a draft of a user manual—to the artist, whereas no user interface was created for the application, which got its variables from an independent text file.