Sound artists and musicians all over the world “produced a series of compositions inspired by individual works from the Smithsonian collection, the world’s largest museum complex – reimagining images and scenes of history, art, science and culture through sound” — Cities and Memory

I chose the item pictured to the right. Since it was sheet music I immediately wanted to know how it sounded. I could not find any version of the music anywhere online, and trying to play it myself was a very slow process. So I downloaded some software that could scan sheet music to MIDI. The music was corrupted in the process and I decided to work with this and explore how the music sounded with different voices and with different tempos. The resulting piece is 5 minutes long but only represents perhaps 10-12 bars of the original. To add texture I incorporated an unfinished project which was my first attempt at creating an ambient/drone piece.

Here is the result:

You can listen to all the pieces here: https://citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian/.