Guido’s Code #A

The installations »Guido’s Code #A« and »#B« refer to what is probably the oldest music algorithm in European history, formulated almost exactly a thousand years ago by the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo.

Using Guido of Arezzo’s method, any text can be used to generate music. He employed the simple rule of assigning different pitches to vowels from which the composer could then choose. The vowel »a«, for example, was assigned the pitches G' E c and a, while vowel »e« was assigned A' F d and b, and so on.

Guido of Arezzo described the algorithm in Chapter 17 of his famous work »Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae«, one of the most important works of music theory of the Middle Ages. The installation »Guido’s Code #A« employs this very algorithm to generate music from the original text of Chapter 17 of »Micrologus«. The resultant melody is played back through loudspeakers or headphones.

In outputting its own sequence of tones, the algorithm results in a self-referential piece, a metaphor for the loop and the recursive, which provide important elements in many programming languages today, while also being typical of »loop-based« electronic music.