On my latest album “Divan” is a track about the Ancient Greek goddess of the moon, Selene. Like the moon waxes and wanes, the same melody is repeated in the movements of the sonata, a little different every time. The modern-style sonata is 15 minutes long, and I did not write it to be sung or quickly listened to – so it is not on SoundCloud. The track is as hypnotic and relaxing as watching the moon cross the sky. The visualization of the track matched the repeating theme of the music. This was an art project as much as it was a music project. So, for your listening pleasure, here is the video of “Selene”.
A note about the artwork
In the video, I show the transition of “Selene” represented as an art image (painting or engraving) and sculpture, as it would have been in Ancient Greece, to a representation of a realistic female figure. That is how the image of the goddess evolved. In stead of worshiping the sculpture of the goddess, as the Ancient Greeks did, partly to explain the movements of the moon, today we see the moon as part of the natural world, as real versus imagined.
The original image of “Selene” was generated in an A.I. app called Dream by Wombo, to provide a blend of a marble sculpture and a realistic woman. However, these images always fall into the Uncanny Valley, and the proportions and facial features generated by the algorithm are never correct, particularly the eyes. I redrew all the images to create these portraits, with the final drawing being a blend of an animated figure made on the MetaHuman A.I. platform of Epic Games, and a static colour image. All the images had to be enlarged and expanded to fit the landscape format of the video.
The spoken word incantations in the song are part of the Homeric Hymns written in the 6th or 7th centuries BC, and were generated on the text-to-speech generator platform Voicemaker.in.
Like the video, the sonata has a music theme that is repeated throughout and expanded on as it builds to a finale, with diminuendos and crescendos like the waxing and waning of the moon. As a whole though, the song is as restful, hypnotic and flowing as looking at the moon traversing the sky.
The sonata took months to write. The artwork took almost as long to create.
Below: Images showing the progression from artificial to realistic style.
