Some people have such original and surprising ideas! Design student Zsanett Szirmay has come up with soundweaving, a process which aims to transform Hungarian folk embroidery into music. I will try to explain,… she transforms folk embroideries into punch card patterns on fabric strips, then forced them past the 20 teeth of a comb inside a punch card music player, and the music box transforms the patterns into music, as it assigns a note to each stitch. I remember about these old things! Perforated thick cardboard showing a specific pattern and making music once inserted into a mechanical organ.
To make her punched cards, Szirmay used the cross-stitch pattern found in embroidered shirts and pillows from the Transylvanian Bukovina, and each time got a musical score, then Bálint Tárkány-Kovács, a Hungarian composer and musician, helped Szirmay audio map the patterns and arrange them into coherent melodies.
‘I used to do folk dancing and wore traditional Hungarian embroidered clothes’, said the designer. ‘Contemplating and taking it a step further, I was curious to find out what cross-stitched patterns might sound like.’
‘Soundweaving adds another dimension to traditional embroidery, activating multiple senses and inspiring visitors to interact since anybody to visit the exhibition can try it for themselves,’ she added. She is studying an MA in textile design at the Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest and the project debuted in September 2014 at Vienna Design Week.
This is such a weird project when you think about it, what could we expect from this? According to the YouTube video accompanying the article, the result sounds very much like this these tiny musical themes coming out from old fashioned music boxes with a dancing ballerina at the top, and the diversity of these melodies is not tremendous despite the large range of embroidery patterns.
Nevertheless, it’s a very poetic idea, the idea that music can emerge from ordinary and everyday objects such as pillows… this is also making a connection between visual objects and musical creations. But could anyone do the reverse? I guess! Don’t you have ever wondered what a Mozart symphony or a Beatles’ song would look like once turned into embroideries?