Claire Lee – Looking Outwards – 10

I decided to write about a short musical piece created by computer music artist and pioneer Laurie Spiegel called Strand of Life (‘Viroid’). I did listen to several other pieces in her album Unseen World, but Strand of Life was really fascinating to me because of both the conception and the result. This piece also interested me because it was so similar in concept to the sound art piece I wrote about in my Looking-Outwards-04, Pierry Jacquillard’s Prélude in ACGT, so I was interested to see each artist’s unique approach to the concept of generating music with patterns derived from genetic material.

Spiegel got the idea for this piece while she was sick with an infection-taking that as inspiration, she converted a viroid’s DNA into midi data and used that as the base for her musical track. I imagine that the algorithm behind the DNA-midi conversion was relatively straightforward, but she incorporates other elements (vocals, instrumentals) that were also partly computer-generated that make the piece much more complex than the sound art I wrote about previously.