I had the utmost the pleasure of visiting my past architecture faculty, Yildiz Technical University at Istanbul/Turkey. YTU was holding a "Bauhaus Workshops Festival" celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus design school and I had the chance to try out a 2-day "Musicographics" workshop with architecture students. During these 2-days, architect assistant researcher Elif Çelik and student assistant İdil Mersin both assisted in carrying out the process. We had architecture, urban design and industrial design students from various cities of Turkey.
The first half of the first day was mostly focused on the presentation of the "Musicographics" project. Later on, we had open discussions about the relationship between architecture and music. We also analyzed and discussed works of Xenakis, Ligeti, Sisman, Adams, Wheeler.
During the second half of the day, all the students selected their own subject "timelines" to be converted into graphical notations. Some of these timelines were derived from the buildings they knew/designed. Some of them were based on urban transportation experiences. And some of them even mapped movies or theatre production processes.
On the second day the students met with our guest performer; guitarist Efe Demiral. They had one-on-one time with him to discuss and finalize their musical pieces. In the end the whole process was presented with a solo guitar concert by Efe, featuring the compositions of the students. You can view the final works in the YouTube playlist below:
It was a thrilling experience to see design oriented students work with music. I hope to carry out more and long term experiments in this sense.