Monotype MIDI

Monotype was a casting system for moveable metal type which used a keyboard, punch-tape and matrix (mould). Patented in 1885, this revolutionary technology greatly improved the speed and often quality, of typesetting for Letterpress printing. Due to the complexity of the Monotype system, it is almost impossible to take a punch-tape from an unknown printing house and decode the text which has been encoded onto it. There are approximately 30,000 possible arrangements of the moulds which correspond to the holes punched in the tape according to the needs of the job at hand.

Inspired by these encrypted patterns of binary holes, this custom software application maps and transcodes the language of mechanical typesetting into musical space. The software reads input text and implements various mappings including the numbers associated with traditional ‘lay of the case’, frequency of letter use, word aggregates. Ultimately these numbers are used to generate pitches and durations of notes as MIDI events which are used to trigger external synthesisers. Letters and words become sounds and spaces are silence. Texts with varying typeset details express their inner musicality – body copy rhythm, poetic meter and structure.

This work uses custom software built in Processing to read raw text and map it into musical space. Words act as note triggers – note duration becomes word length, pitch becomes aggregated letter count. Each letter is paired with a value based upon the ‘lay of the case’ in a letterpress context (many e’s, few z’s). The resulting compound number is mapped into MIDI note space and quantized to a common scale. The resulting complex melodic event sequence is used as the basis for player response and improvisation. Different texts exhibit diverse timings, pitches and repeats (eg. poems, novels, concrete poetry, etc.).

This work was developed as an interdisciplinary collaboration between staff of the Interaction Design and Communication Design Departments at The Glasgow School of Art. MonotypeMIDI was created in Processing using the MIDIbus Library and would not be possible without the generous support of the Open Source community.

An article and interview with the team about the project is featured in the Feb 2025 issue of the journal Book 2.0 https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/btwo_00109_7

The software fuses old and new ideas and technologies in order to reveal untapped musical potential in the world of books, texts, poems and stories. Sources of random pitch and gate signals such as white-noise are a mainstay of electronic music production. Whilst this system can be used similarly to the popular eurorack Turing Machine or Buchla Source of Uncertainty modules, MonotypeMIDI excels in creating pseudo-random CV which the performer channels and loops inspired by their interpretation of the text being processed.

Applying the system to favourite poems or stories often reveals hidden and unexpected rhythms and repetitions. This embedded musicality offers wonderful new opportunities to explore the written word in combination through the world of texture, melody and rhythm available through electronic music equipment. A particular favourite with the team has been processing examples of Concrete Poetry where striking visual rhythms and repetitions are instantly translated into musical space to inspire the performer in creating improvised or arranged soundscapes and compositions.