To Design Music, To Hear the City

As an architect who studied Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) in Istanbul, it is inevitable
that I am interested in mathematical shapes. I have been inspired by George Stiny’s Shape grammars,
Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals and Escher’s transformative illustrations. These different worlds of
architectural design, geometry and visual design all share a core idea that can be summarized by a
quote from Mandelbrot: “Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without
end." 1 In other words: If you start with a basic shape and a basic rule to transform it, by repeating the
same modification over and over, you’ll end up with very complex and unique shapes.

The idea of shapes and calculating with shapes stayed with me when I started my studies in jazz piano
performance. As a musician I was intrigued to find an equivalent of mathematical shapes in music. To
explore this vision, I conducted a research titled “Music Design Studio”, at Prins Claus Conservatorium
(2014, Groningen).

The research aimed to create a new universal class for improvising musicians (of any genre) by
modifying the architectural design studio class. It was based on gestalt, basic design principals,
abstraction and the principals of shape grammars 2. The idea was to connect the mutual terminology
of music and visual arts, such as: patterns, textures, hierarchy, unity, contrast, rhythm, repetition,
proximity, balance and space. The practical part of the studio was going out into the city (as is common
practice in various architecture schools), finding an object, a building, a shape or an art product as
inspiration, and capturing its essence 3. We extracted rules from this essence and then translated these
rules into musical material, creating musical shapes. How exactly does this work? Capturing its essence through
drawing, sketching?

I took the concept of the design studio as a point of departure and turned towards a more visual
method for representing organized sounds: graphic notations. Using my background as an architect, I
have been trying to develop visual languages to construct graphic notations, using the principles of
founded
Mandelbrot, Escher and Stiny. Recently I have been the founder and organizer of the interdisciplinary
collective “Automata”: Architects and musicians creating and performing graphical representations of
buildings and urban spaces. The collective took part in the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial this year.
change to: “Automata”, in which architects and musicians create and perform
In this article I will give a brief introduction to my world of graphic notations and graphical
representation of music, starting with creating timelines, graphic scores and ending with the
experiments of “Automata”.

1
Benoit Mandelbrot, TED Talk, 2010.
2
Stiny, G. (2006). Shape: Talking about seeing and doing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
3
Aristotle describes in his work, Physics (Book 2) and Metaphysics that there are four different aspects that
define an entity/substance, one of them being “essence”. He uses the phrase “to ti ên einai”, “the what it was
to be” to describe it. Aristotle, Physics, Book 2, Chapter 2/3.
 Thinking in Shape Grammars

Shape Grammars, invented by George Stiny, are a set of rules of transformation applied recursively to
an initial form, generating new forms. The initial forms are usually very basic objects like squares,
triangles, curves etc. (Figure 1).

Use subtitles for all figures, such as:

“Figure 1: An example of shape grammar.”

In this figure you can see the initial block in the first frame followed by the rule: “Slice the ¼ of the
shape and rotate it 90 degrees”. And then you apply this rule to all the intermediate products until you
reach a desirable final product. The essence of this way of working is that you start with a very basic
object and a seemingly basic rule and by just repeating the process, you end up with very complex and
potentially interesting shapes.

After working with shape grammars for many years in my design practice, I have started to try to look
at the shapes around me as if they were the final products of a shape grammar (even if they are not).
Of course, many different conclusions can be made based on your artistic preferences (A square can
be made out of two brackets or two rectangles or just four lines).

This creates the kind of ambiguity that is useful in the artistic practice. As George Stiny describes: “I’m
obsessed with shapes. They’re almost everywhere I look, and once they’re in view I can’t take my eyes
off of them. I always wonder what I’m going to see next. Nothing looks the same for very long, but this
needn’t be as strange and confusing as it sounds. I know what to do with the ambiguity. Shapes
change—I can see them in alternative ways anytime I choose—and I can use the novelty to design. It’s
an inexhaustible source of creative ideas.” 4

To connect the domains of music and architecture by means of shape grammars, we have to reduce
them to their basic parts we can work on. Architecture is based on the basic shapes we have discussed
but then the question arises, what could be the basic shapes in music? There is no definite answer but
only suggestions.

A shape grammar most musicians already know is chord inversions. If you accept a triad as a basic
shape, you use the operation of changing the order of the notes to create its inversions. Even though
the operation results in the same collection of pitches, as the intervals between them change, their
effect is significantly different.

4
George Stiny, Shape 2006, Page 13.
could you add
anything such Another shape grammar example can be the diminished 6th scale system of Barry Harris where he takes
as as half a
sentence that I6 (major or minor) and II diminished (E.g. C6 and Ddim) and combines them together to make a scale
explains this in with 8 notes. In fact, the operation can be summarized as taking two 4-note chords that do not share
a more general
way, to be a note and combining them to make an 8-note scale. A similar approach can be observed in the triad
slightly better pairs, usually major triads a major second apart, John Coltrane frequently uses in his improvisations.
understandable
for non-
musicians? We can also create shape grammars for melodies by simply making rules concerning pitch, direction,
timbre etc. A rule can be: End the melody on chord tones or if two consecutive lines are both ascending
the next melodic line has to be descending.

On the other hand, Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique or Olivier Messiaen’s modes of limited
transposition can be seen as shape grammars for the whole equal temperament system of western
classical music.
additional approaches to

The Essence of things

The essence of architecture is that it exists out of time and the essence of music is that it only exists in
the flow of time. As Goethe was famously quoted to say: “Music is liquid architecture, architecture is
frozen music”.

The idea is to look at an architectural design and tear it into its parts not randomly but in regards to its
“essence”. The essence we adopt will change the parts we tear apart. This is a process of
deconstruction, representation, abstraction and conversion (Figure 2).

an
But first, what can be the essence of the object? The wooden construct in front of me can indeed be
a chair but it can also be a shortened couch, a coffee table in a student house, a portable mini ladder
Fantastic
for changing light bulbs or act as a weapon in a bar fight. We can also encounter a lot of objects that example!!!
belong to a certain concept without fulfilling our expectations of it. Is penguin a bird? When we think
of a bird many of us think of a flying animal with feathers. Or when we think of a chair, a rocking chair
is not the first thing we’re reminded of. Being open to different possible essences of an object is what
makes way for different interpretations. In the figure you can see my interpretation of a man with a
rocking chair (Figure 3).
Where’s figure 3?
 Timelines without time

The minimum requirement for music is time. But if I’m interested in buildings, there is no obvious flow
of time. For me to convert the essence and the design rules of a building into music, I have to convert
What is “it” in it into a flow of time, a timeline.
this case?

There are many ways to create time in a building. One way is to examine the objects with time that
interact with the building. This can be the people that use the building. Mapping their activities with
the building, like functions, habits, walking routes and activity times will create a timeline. Or I can
observe and map how natural phenomenon, like the sun, wind and rain interact with the building
phenomena such as
through time (Figure 4).

Another way of extracting time out of a building is merely looking at its history or how it’s built.
Archeologically significant sites usually have layers and layers of buildings on top of each other,
creating interesting timelines. Finally, I may just deconstruct the building from a design perspective
and use my own thought process as a timeline as well.

Experiencing or reporting on an experience of an object creates a timeline with a narrative. Walking

calmly next to a canal or diving into a canal would definitely create dramatically different stories
requiring different approaches to music. We, as artists, can decide which perspective best suites our
interest and captures the intended essence of the entity we are working on.

Time itself can always be divided into smaller connected parts, forming a “flow” (like an animation) or
abstracted into disconnected parts, forming “states” 5. Can the essence of our object best be
represented with a flow or with a collection of states?

If the essence of the idea I’m working on suits better with the “flow”, like: a river, traffic, motion,
speech, conversation, air, smell etc., I approach the notation from a flowing perspective. Meaning that
rather than separate symbols, like texts or hieroglyphs, we are going to use uninterrupted symbols
created with swift gestures. If the essence of the idea suits better with the “state, like: building, table,
text, paper, cars etc., I’m going to invent separate symbols as instances of time to construct our
timeline. In the figure you can observe how I deconstructed the colours and the elements of Signac’s
“Pink Cloud”, some as states and some as flows (Figure 6).

Is this
figure 3?
(Don’t
think
so…)

5
States as in computer science.
Figure 5
Graphic Notation
I have decided to use graphic notation as a tool to connect architecture and music mainly because
graphic scores allow a certain level of ambiguity and they are open to inventions. Moreover, they give
me the possibility of implementing shape grammars visually into music. I believe graphic notation holds
the potential of bridging the visual and audio worlds together.
or: aural
Musicians have been experimenting with graphic notations since the early 20th Century. Some graphic
notations are just an augmentation of traditional notation, still notated on ledger lines but with
alternative symbols (Cornelius Cardew, Treatise). Some only show approximate pitch whereas others
only show approximate rhythm (Rudolf Komorous’ 13 Preludes). Some still use traditional elements
but along with abstract symbols that are completely open to interpretation. Moreover, graphic scores
are also used as a representation/transcription of the original music as in the case of Rainer Wehinger’s
graphic notation (or Hörpartitur) transcription of György Ligeti’s Artikulation (Figure 5).

A great compilation of graphic scores was made by composer John Cage called Notations (1969). The
book is made up of a large collection of graphical scores, facsimiles of holographs, from the Foundation
for Contemporary Performance Arts, with quotes by 269 composers, which are presented in
alphabetical order, with each score allotted equal space. From these quotes, I have made guidelines
to create graphic scores. :

• Wassily Kandinsky, in his work “Point and Line to Plane”, drew a graphic notation of an excerpt
from Beethoven’s 5th with the collaboration of Franz von Hoesslin 6 (Figure 5). His idea was to
use points and lines and their relations to represent music. This is the approach I’m also trying
to use in my process, basic shapes that contribute to a language.

6
Kandinsky, Wassily (1926) “Point and Line to Plane”, Bahaus.
 • Designing symbols and shapes that have open meanings are quite useful. A drawn square can
simultaneously represent a column in a building and a chord in a composition. As David
Behrman, American composer and a pioneer of computer music wrote in Notations 7: “A
perfect notation is not one which documents exactly. If it were, today’s technology would
finally have provided ideal notation – a tape recording or film of a correct performance.
Notation is lively when it calls for a temporal result that can only be hinted at by its spatial
symbols requiring more than automation to bring it to life”.

• An important step that I consider while making graphic notation is the instant resemblance
factor. The notation should speak to you in an instant of time, pushing you towards an effect
the composer had intended. This way, the notation does not require much explanation and it
has the potential to be easy to remember. Different musical elements should show their syntax
within the score with the use of shape or colour.
Finally, it is necessary
• It is also necessary that the notation is able to speak to you at an artistic level. Looking at
something cared, thought for and designed not just in a logical way but in an artistic way sets
up a constructive mood. As Vitruvius says in De Architectura a building should be “firmitas,
utilitas, venustas” – that is, it must be solid, useful, beautiful.

Scale, Proportion

Scale has multiple meanings in architecture. Drawings can be to scale (adhering to an established or
agreed reference or system), ‘out of’, or ‘not to’ scale. Historically, architects have employed a range
of scale systems. Classical Greek and Roman architecture, for example, used a modular system of
measurement (cubits). In classical architecture each module was the width of the column base, and
this was used to determine the classical system of orders and their relative proportioning. Vitruvius
used the “Vitruvian Man” and Le Corbusier used “Modulor” both basing their proportional systems on
the human body, approximately 1900 years apart.

To represent a space or building, comparative scale systems are needed to design, develop and explain
the architectural idea. When drawing to scale, the correct scale system needs to be used for the
appropriate context. Smaller or larger scale investigations will lend themselves better to different
types of projects, for example, the design of a city will be better understood in large scale, whereas
the design of a piece of furniture will necessitate a smaller scale system and drawing 8.

My view is that this should not be different in music. Yet, we, as musicians, only write music on the
smallest scale of representation: traditional music notation which is the equivalent of an application
drawing (the type of drawing with which the building is physically constructed with) in architecture.
Though composers use many different ways of analysis to address bigger scales of representation,
there is no agreed universal way of doing such. In jazz, it is common practice to orally converse about
bigger forms such as playing a 12-bar blues or playing an A-A-B-A song but this does not enter to the
world of notation.

This is where graphic scores excel as they can be designed to represent bigger scales of music. Those
could be 4-8 bar fragments, 16-32 bar forms or even moving to a bigger scale, comparing different
pieces of music in a concert.

7
John Cage, Notations, 1969
8
FARRELLY, Lorraine (2007) The Fundamentals of Architecture (AVA Publishing, Lausanne)
Automata

Automata 9 is a collective I have founded, consisting of improvising musicians and designers that work
together to create conceptual graphic scores and musical compositions. It aims to create a structured
language for an interdisciplinary dialog between designers and musicians based on the universal
language of design principles and shape grammars.

With this experimental approach, Automata aims to remap events, ideas, concepts, urban spaces and
buildings as timeline graphics and music. Automata hopes to start a dialog on basic design concepts
and their interchangeability between music and design professions while pointing out to the
soundscape we live in. It proposes to ask the questions:

Can the designer learn to play with ideas, instinctively like a musician? And can an improvising musician
learn to plan on a bigger scale like a designer? Can a dialogue between the two help invoke new
perspectives of time to their respective professions? Can we start this dialogue with graphic scores.
?

1- The Experiment
Our first musical experiment took place in Rotterdam, Pauluskerk. I chose this building as a source
of interest for two reasons:

• Being a very unusual building for its function (church)

• Though looking chaotic, consisting of very basic shapes (triangles)

I started by making sketches and notes at the building site. What spoke to me most were the
structure of triangles joining in asymmetrical angles, coming together to form a polygon mesh. For
me this was the essence of the being of its design. The small triangle windows mimicking a gothic
rose window above the entrance and the nets where the bell is placed caught my attention as well.
The main problem of making a graphic score based on a building or an object without motion is
that they have no motion, they’re timeless. As I’ve stated in the graphic notation section, the
minimum of creating a graphic score is laying down a timeline. So how do you make a timeline for
an object that has no obvious time (other than having sermons on Sundays)?
the score based on the

Deconstruction was my tool when I worked on Pauluskerk, what I did in my graphic score of
Pauluskerk was to get this polygon mesh made out of triangles as if it’s a toy I can hold in my hand
and open it up like pealing an orange. The score moves on like the building is designed, made up
of regular triangles repeated in an irregular fashion.
window appears, the bell
At the centre of the graphic score you can see the rose windows appearing and the bell sitting in
its black spot. The latter part of the graphic score is representing the more ordinary looking part
of the building on the east side, triangles fading into the rectangular shapes used there.

9
The collective currently consists of members coming from highly interdisciplinary backgrounds: founder and
leader: musician/architect Murat Ali Cengiz, Funda Yildirim (Cognitive Scientist), Erdogan Cem Evin
(musician/computer engineer), musician Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone saxophone) and architect Efe Kagan
Hızar.
 2- Reflection
worked with four
For this experiment my goal was to make a graphic score intended for improvisation. I have picked
4 musicians including myself, Giuseppe Doronzo (Baritone Saxophone), Erdoğan Cem Evin (guitar),
Adnan Dura (alto Saxophone) and gave them the following instructions:

• This graphic score is based on Pauluskerk, Rotterdam

• The main idea are the triangles repeating in irregular ways
• You have to make a build-up towards the bell in the middle
• What you do at the bell is up to you but it has to standout.
• In the end you start to lose the shapes of the triangles as they transform into rectangles and fade
away.
• The improvisation has to be 90 seconds.

One of the interesting results of this experiment was that, even though this score was made for
improvisation, with the given information, the musicians had to compose and prepare a significant
amount of time before being able to deliver an improvised performance. Here you can listen to
mine and Giuseppe Doronzo’s interpretation of the score combined together 10. An important thing
It is important
to note to note is that we have made our individual recordings without listening to each other (Figure 7).

Conclusion

My work on graphical notation has been an inspiring journey so far, even creating a new
graphical notation for the sounds of the Turkish language in the process 11. Also, with the
“Automata” we were also a part of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial this year. I believe it was
an inspiring journey for everyone involved as well.
into
Except for its artistic value, the practice of going out to the city to abstract buildings and
objects, create an inevitable awareness of the city both for the musicians and the designers.
After concluding the Pauluskerk experiment, we, the participants of the experiment, can no
longer ignore the building as it is a personalized object for each of us. The feeling is comparable
to being able to read for the first time. You can never again look at the signs around yourself
without reading them.

I believe this method of work, joining architects and musicians together, can also be an
conservatoires
alternative teaching method in design schools and conservatories. There is a lot these
professions can learn from each other, in the end both design and music rely on mathematics,
as
ratios, scales and relations. If we can create new tools to convert these ideas into one another,
Or put this there is chance for great innovation.
somewhere in
a footnote,
but the ending
of the In the near future, I hope to write a book on graphic scores based on architectural drawing
previous methods. I hope that the experience with “Automata” will fuel this endeavour as well.
paragraph is
much
stronger as a
final
sentence.

10
https://soundcloud.com/murat-cengiz-4/pauluskerk
11
“Graphical Notation as Representation” (2018, HKU, Master Thesis with Dr. Falk Hübner)
References

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Representation’, Leonardo, p. 75. doi: 10.2307/1576167.

Cage, J. (1969) ‘Notations’, p. 314.

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Goodman, N. (1968) ‘Languages of Art, An Approach to a Theory of Symbols’. Harvard University.

Kandinsky, Wassily (1926) “Point and Line to Plane”, Bahaus.

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Stiny, G. (1991) ‘The algebras of design’, Research in Engineering Design. doi: 10.1007/BF01578998.

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