I finally decided to put up a website after The Verb on Radio 3 commissioned my new piece Pilingual.
Pilingual is part of a larger project collecting and inviting Pi poems in every language of the world. A Pi poem follows the formula of Pi (3.14159...): e.g. each poem starts with a 3 letter word followed by a 1 letter word followed by a 4 letter word etc.
2006 is the 300th anniversary of the first use of the letter Pi to express the ratio between diameter and circumference of a circle. Pilingual (for radio) will be broadcast in Dec 2006.
Pilingual (for radio) is a 300 word Pi poem by me, intercut with Pi poems from Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
For the piece, I have been kindly granted two important permissions: to use computer-synthesised voices in these languages from http://www.pollyglotto.com/index8.php and an archive of Pi poems at http://wwwold.cilea.it/~bottoni/www-cilea/F90/piph.htm.
The piece was written to use all the available languages at the former, for which I had poems from the latter.
Wednesday, 8 November 2006
