Image: CC BY Sanna Marttila & Neea Laakso
Creating a musical greeting card might not be as difficult as you think. Combine this with open cultural heritage content and you have a successful recipe for a creative workshop. Sound & Vision provided music recordings for the audio element in the cards. The “Downsampling Masterpieces Workshop” was organized as a part of Europeana Creative’s “Redesign Your Cultural Heritage!” session at the Mozilla Festival in London (October 2014). The session was one of the activities under the "Art and Culture of the Web" track and explored how open cultural content can be used in creative ways, by playing with image resolution and audio conversion.
Public Domain Content
High-resolution images are often unavailable for free reuse due to copyright reasons. Even for works that belong to the Public Domain, such as old paintings, only low-resolution digital copies might be available. Facing such a situation can be frustrating. However, instead of dwelling in despair, the Downsampling Masterpieces Workshop examined what kind of expressive opportunities low resolutions might provide. Embracing the 8-bit aesthetic and DIY electronics, participants made melody cards using downsampled masterpieces in painting and music, which are accessible via Europeana. One of the sources for creativity were Public Domain images of famous painting from the Rijksmuseum. The museum is among the few who provide such images in a very accessible way and in high resolution. Secondly, recordings of famous music pieces provided by Sound & Vision were used– another nice Public Domain collection which is encouraged to be reused. The sound recordings were provided to Europeana trough the ECLAP project, which is an online archive for the performing arts in Europe. As workshop co-organiser Kati Hyyppä from Aalto University: ‘I liked the Sound & Vision collection because they were well-known classical music pieces (went well together with the high art of the Rijksmuseum) and there was a clear note encouraging reuse of the content.’
Image: CC-BY Sanna Marttila & Neea Laakso
The Workshop
At the beginning of the workshop everyone got an electronics kit, which included an ATtiny85 microcontroller, a small speaker, a battery, a LED, a switch and couple of resistors. Each of the microcontrollers contained a different surprise melody, which was based on one of the famous music pieces, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The melodies were created by converting the original mp3 recordings first into MIDI, and then into Arduino code using an online tool. They were truly surprise melodies in the sense that there was not much resemblance with the original piece in the end of the conversion process! In order to play their melody, the participants had to solder their electronics into a functioning circuit. The electronics were then hot glued on the card itself, which was made from cardboard, foamboard and prints of downsampled Public Domain masterpiece paintings. The downsampled images were generated beforehand by pixelating the selected images of famous paintings, giving them the look of retro computer graphics. The last touch to the melody card was the switching mechanism that played the melody when opening the card.
Check out one of the results from the workshop on Vimeo:
Downsampling Masterpieces Workshop - Melody card example from Kati Hyyppä on Vimeo.
Get Started!
If you want to get started and make your own melody card have a look at the DIY instructions & further information
Special thanks to Kati Hyyppä for providing the initial text for this blogpost and to the organisers of the workshop at Mozilla Fest: Sanna Marttila, Neea Laakso (Aalto University), Christina Holm (Spild af Tid) and James Morley (Europeana)
Useful links: