Empty

Intention

Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?

The audio I chose is titled "Empty" by Winner. Portraying a breakup with a girl, this song embodies an emotional experience a man goes through. It's in one of my everyday playlists, so I thought I would represent it better than any other song.

The goal of my project is to unpack the details of this song, including its lyrics, its beats, and its melody lines, and then to reconstitute them in a physical form. After looking at a couple of examples of physical representation pieces and closely appreciating them, I came up with my own sketch of how I was going to characterize this song.

Product

What was the final representation? What did you create? What is it composed with (materials, shapes, forms)? Describe the textures, colors, etc.

First, I wanted to express a broken heart of man from the song using the jaggedness of a tin can. So I cut the can in half with a knife, (which was kind of scary) and made cuts here and there to make the edges look as dangerous as possible. Also, I chose a tin can, because the overall mood of the song is hollow and reminded me of an empty tin can. Then, I used "empty" balloons to represent the title. I made the balloons look lolled my imitating "Persistence of Memory" by Dali. I also chose the darker colors of balloons to match the ambience of the song.

Aside from the mood and flow of the song, I melted in the actual physical waveform of the song using a copper wire. With the image of the waveform in my hands, I made the wire look similar to the waveform of my favorite part. Then I put it between the uneven surfaces of the pieces of the can. Finally, I used a black acrylic yarn to represent confinement of space, so I could illustrate how a person feels when he doesn't want to get out of his room after a breakup of a relationship. 

Approach

How did you approach the assignment and re-creation of the work in a physical medium? Cite examples that informed your approach

Before I looked at any of the examples, I first followed the "Process" section in the instructions. As soon as I selected the song I was going to work with, I analyzed the music by listening to it over and over, trying to come up with ways to interpret the important words, the overall flow, some patterns or repetitions. I also tried importing the song into Audacity to take a look at its waveform.

As a result, I came up with multiple ideas on how to illustrate the song into a physical format, in terms of colors, textures, shapes, and materials.

Then, I looked at some of the examples to inform myself of ways to implement my sketch. The one that was most influential to me was the examples from "SCORES for Notation 21 Collection." Among the images, the image below was how I wanted to implement my design.

Reflection

Do you think you captured the content and aesthetics of the audio accurately? Is it recognizable as the original sound? What did you learn? What would you do differently?

I tried to melt in as many aspects of the song as I could, using various materials and techniques. Thus, I think I captured both the content and the audio itself pretty accurately across the whole song, and recognizable as the original sound.

From this project, I learned that physical art installations and music are not the totally separate boundaries of art after all. As I created a physical representation of an audio that is also recognized as an audio, the same applies for any kind of art pieces. For me, this process required a lot of thoughts and creativity as I have never done this kind of stuff my whole life, but it was certainly fun.

If I had time longer than just two hours, I'd like to try a physical embodiment that's a little more sophisticated, such as creating a wooden or metal figure by actually sculpting from scratch.