Bowie's lyrics and sales inspire new musical composition

David Bowie’s extraordinary career is being transformed into new compositions as part of an event celebrating his impact on the global music scene.

Plymouth University composer Dr Alexis Kirke and electronic music pioneer Martyn Ware have conducted an in-depth analysis of Bowie’s music and success, which included estimated album sales of over 140 million.

They have then transformed this into new ‘sonification’ tunes, and they will be played for the first time at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday 26 April as part of its Bowie Weekender.

Dr Kirke, composer-in-residence at the University’s Marine Institute, said: “David Bowie is a fantastic songwriter, unique actor and towering cultural icon, so I’m excited to have the opportunity to be involved in events for the V&A’s widely-acclaimed exhibition on his impact. It is also great to be collaborating with the multi-faceted Martyn Ware. At one of their early gigs, Bowie called the Human League ‘the future of music’, so to be working with a key architect of the UK electronic scene is a privilege as well.”

Dr Kirke, a member of the University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, has been involved in a number of recent innovative works.

These include Open Outcry, an opera influenced by the nation’s financial institutions, and Many Worlds, a film which watches the audience as they watch it.

For this, he has teamed up with Martyn Ware, a founding member of Heaven 17 and the Human League, who has also worked as a producer with stars including Tina Turner and Erasure.

To prepare the data for sonification, they used statistical analyses of areas such as the emotional content of Bowie’s lyrics and the prominence of major and minor keys in Bowie songs. Other elements incorporated include album sales data.

These have then been mapped onto musical features such as tempo, pitch and loudness and turned into new compositions, in an effort to make the progressions of Bowie’s artistic mood and commercial impact more understandable.

The performance is an element of the Friday Late event during the Bowie Weekender, which in turn is part of the V&A’s critically acclaimed and record breaking exhibition David Bowie Is that runs until August.

It is the first international retrospective of Bowie’s career and features more than 300 objects including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs and Bowie's own instruments.