Charts Music

Johannes Kreidler (born in 1980) is one of the most controversial young composers today. He can be a very sharp provocateur, makes frequent forays into pop, and often uses music to raise ethical questions.

One of his songs, Product Placements (2008), is a provocation against GEMA (the German copyright and licenses company). In Germany, with splendid Teutonic consistency, to register a song, you must fill out a form for each sample used, no matter how short. In Product Placements, Kreidler manages to cram 70,200 samples from other people's records into the space of 33 seconds. Naturally, with such a concentration, the individual samples are unrecognizable. Nonetheless, Kreidler insisted on registering the song by submitting 70,200 forms.

In the piece we present, Charts Music (2009), the melodies are generated by following the curves of stock market graphs (essentially descending) and casualty figures in Iraq (ascending), including the trend of debt and the unemployment rate in the US. The graphs are remapped to a musical scale and harmonized with SongSmith, the Microsoft software that automatically generates accompaniment in a chosen style based on the melody.

The result is a hilarious and disturbing example of sonification.

Kreidler lives in Berlin and teaches music theory and electronic music at the University of Music and Theatre in Rostock, at the Hochbegabtenzentrum of the University of Music in Detmold and at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover.

Back