One meter per minute

One-minute-long music box compositions fossilized in visual artworks

One Meter Per Minute is an ongoing series of one-minute-long compositions each fossilized in visual artworks created through paper-fed music boxes. The title comes from a fascination with the idea of measuring music in meters instead of minutes and a general interest in the music box, whose paper can be at the same time a musical score, a recorded medium, and a graphic visualization of the sound.

In the series, visual and temporal space play equal roles in the composition process. The compositions may take the shape of sound objects or architectures rather than as composed-out melodies, or in other cases a musical procedure can be clearly visualized in graphic pointalistic space.

The work shown here is the duo’s trace, a work donated to the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, and one result of the duo’s seven month artist residency there in 2019/2020.

The compositions of each visual work are recorded by over-dubbing recordings of a music box that plays each strip’s hole-punched melody. The recordings are each adjusted to be one minute in length to facilitate synchronization. Left-most strips can be heard in the left ear, and right-most in the right. The strips are read from top to bottom.

Selected Works

Making One Meter Per Minute: