What does this painting sound like?

Jackson Pollock's "Cathedral" (1947), shown left, is a riot of yellows, greens, blacks and whites executed in the painter's trademark drip style.

But what does it sound like?

It's a speculative, maybe even silly question. But the Dallas Museum of Art and students at the University of Texas at Dallas have embarked on a project to answer it as best they can.

Their efforts -- lead by Frank DuFour, who teaches a sound design class at UTD -- have resulted in a series of digital soundscapes to accompany specific works in the museum's collection.

Visitors can listen to the soundtracks using their iPhones or other hand-held Internet devices. (The museum has about 20 iPhones available to check out.) Each musical clip lasts anywhere from 40 seconds to more than a minute.

Seven works are featured in the project: Pollock's "Cathedral"; Frederic Edwin Church's painting "The Icebergs" (1861); a Roman mosaic titled "Orpheus Taming Wild Animals"; an ancient statue of the Mexican rain god Tlaloc; an Indonesian "protective" sculpture; a Japanese sculpture from the 16th or 17th century titled "Emma-O"; and a pair of Tiffany Windows.

The museum is rolling out the project as part of a larger effort called "Bonus Features" to help visitors engage with art via hand-held technology, including short videos that feature curators and other added information.

So what do the soundscapes sound like? For Pollock's "Cathedral," one student mixed jazz and electronic music (a solo trumpet figures prominently) with the sound of dripping paint. 

For "The Icebergs," the museum features two soundscapes: a musical track with strings and a solo piano (think Brian Eno meets Ryuichi Sakamoto), and an abstract track that evokes the sounds of the ocean and a creaking wooden vessel.

The museum says that it hopes to apply the same technology to two upcoming exhibitions -- one dealing with Impressionism and French photography, and another with coastlines and other bodies of water.

You can listen to the soundtracks for "Cathedral" and "The Icebergs" here.

-- David Ng

Photo: Jackson Pollock's "Cathedral" (1947). Credit: Dallas Museum of Art

Comments

[Fae L. Kaufman]

AS far as sound goes when it relates to a painting such as Jackson Pollock, I find that it is chaotic and irritating just like our society and moralistic attitudes of today......Since Jackson Pollock was a good friend of one of the Guggenheim family members, it is not surprising that he obtained all of the hollow hoopla that he did get......It is sad that our society cannot rise above the creative endeavors that Mozart, Beethovan, Monet, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and many wonderful writers.....We are a society that has plunged ourselves into mediocrity which shadows our obtained ignorance.....It is not a good boding for this country that we don't challenge the society to produce greater and greater achievements in all parts of our society.......

[Donald Frazell]

This was done almost fifty years ago. Ornette Coleman has a Pollock on the cover of his Free Jazz album, and it fit perfectly. They were dealing with the same purpose but from different cultures and technical aspects, A white American painter based on Modernism and a black American musician based on be-bop and the blues, the musical equivalent to analytical cubism and expressionism.

As with Pollocks work, free jazz is hit and miss, when it works it is great, but without depth and relationships built through pure improvisation, it can be just paint sitting there, no movement, no life, no soul. But when it works, its is great, and gives off a living presence, a spirituality in its purest form. It is a limited form of art, but can work, and has left its mark on their respective fields.