From Canvas to Music: Mathematics as a Tool for the Composition of Jackson Time

The creation of ``Jackson time'' is a project which involves a composer, Davide Amodio, and a mathematician, Chiara de Fabritiis. Our common aim was to to ``translate'' a painting by Jackson Pollock, Summertime n. 9, into a piece of music, making use of different mathematical tools to detect the quantities needed for the composition. We were inspired by the idea that the painting itself contained some kind of inner--music, due to the fact that Pollock's moves during the dripping on the canvas had a sort of rhythm, indeed they were often described by witnesses as a dance. This paper describes the mathematical background, in particular it illustrates both the analysis of the painting which was carried out by the two of us and the choice of the mathematical techniques applied to compute the parameters needed for the composition, which is due to the author. The reader will find a more detailed report on the composition itself in Davide Amodio's contribution.