Meditation 1: Lost in Translation

Random thought number one:
The composer John Cage spent a fair portion of his musical career dealing with the problem of compositional process. He found it disappointing (and somewhat amusing) that four hundred years of Western art music had spawned a generation of composers who were willing to jettison conventional rules of harmony, instrumentation, etc., but were very conservative with regards to the creative act of composition itself. Cage's use of chance interventions, the I-Ching, and highly physical, task-based composition techniques were in many ways an articulation of his belief that the process of music making was just as important as the end result. John Cage's correspondence with Pierre Boulez is based around this debate.

Random thought number two:

The Altavista language translation engine (optimistically dubbed Babelfish, after the creature in Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) is widely used as a quick-and-dirty text and hypertext translation service by millions of people worldwide. It is also widely reviled for its amazing lack of basic vocabulary in commonly-used languages and its complete lack of credibility when performing translations. One way to explore this phenomenon is by discovering translations that fail to properly invert (e.g. the translation from language A to language B and back again does not result in anything remotely resembling the original text). Two of my favorites from the English-to-French and French-English services:


English: i miss you
French: je m'ennuie de vous
English: I am bored you

English: my dog has fleas
French: mon chien a des puces
English: my dog has chips
French: mon chien a des morceaux
English: my dog has pieces


The Task:
The two above random thoughts have kernels of intersection; one may be that translation can be seen as a process that, when used literally, can provide unexpected and compositionally interesting outcomes.

Keeping this in mind, create a brief compositional study which explores one or more translation faults in the Babelfish service. Feel free to explore multiple chains of translation (e.g. English-to-French-to-Portuguese-to-English). Don't worry if you don't understand one of the languages your working with. That might even be better. Record yourself speaking the resulting text piece (either one side of the translation or both). Bring it in on Class 6 (in a little under two weeks). We'll give it a listen and put it on the radio.

P.S. If you haven't guessed yet, you don't need Processing or Csound to do this meditation. Just make sure to correctly transcribe the actions you performed on the Altavista site so that you can explain and repeat your process (in other words, I want to see a notation of the piece). As source material, I recommend commonly used colloquial phrases, the complete works of William Shakespeare (you can feed Babelfish a URL, too!) or anything written by Rush Limbaugh. Have fun.