In honor of International Women’s Day, LG Electronics and its LG XBOOM GO speaker line presented Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna Mozart, whose talent was as celebrated as her brother’s. Despite having to leave aside her potential as an artist due to the obligation to find a husband and get married, LG joined technology, linguistic and its music quality to transform the individual characteristics of her texts (analyzed from more than 150 pages of her letters and diaries) into a music which could only have been written by her. The piece, entitled “Das Königreich Rücken” (“The Kingdom of Back”), was named after an imaginary kingdom from Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus’ childhood made reference to in their correspondences.
Each musical note has a unique, set frequency. C, for example, is 261.63 Hz, while G sounds at 392 Hz. This was the logic behind the composition of “Das Königreich Rücken.” As we speak, each syllable has a frequency that, while close to a musical note, is rarely spot on. That’s why we turned to Waves Tune, a software program developed to capture vocal expressions and adjust them into musical notes. Words and phrases from 66 letters exchanged between Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and 90 diary pages were analyzed to define the artist’s way of expressing herself. A German interpreter was invited to read the letters and diary of Maria Anna Mozart out loud, and the software translated the recording into musical notes by tuning the syllables. If a spoken syllable hit 387 Hz, for example, the program interpreted it as G. That’s how a catalogue of spoken phrases, transformed into musical notes, came to be analysed by pianist Heloisa Fernandes, who reorganised them temporally and spatially into a piece for piano, in the style of the period. Finally, on International Women’s Day, the music was available on Spotify as the first music credit to Maria Anna Mozart, making justice to her talent more than 250 years later. LG also posted a video on Youtube telling the story of Nannerl and inviting people to listen to her “new” music. A tribute not only to Maria Anna Mozart, but also to every woman who should never be obligated to give up on her potential.
