Revisiting December Hollow: Unearthing emotive shape

This paper documents an ongoing project between the composer/engineer Peter Zinovieff, composer Milton Mermikides and violinist Anne-Marie Curran-Cundy. The project is a developed realization of Zinovieff's 1969 December Hollow 'fold-out score' concept. The compositional system is designed to generate electronic music and/or conventional scores by slicing through a three-dimensional topographical score of 'emotional zones'. Each zone is associated with a vector of musical parameters and by selecting various trajectories through the shape, countless pieces may be generated. This paper briefly outlines the approach taken to realize this idea, and develop it with the implementation of real-time processing, the mapping of score space with RGB space and vector transformations of Schumann's Mein Herz ist Schwer, within an adaptive performance model