Reproduce Experience

I visited the Miller Gallery at CMU, which is currently having an exhibition called Aftersound: Frequency, Attack, Return, which had a lot of pieces displaying sound visualization.

Work

This was the last piece I saw on the third floor of the gallery. At first I was just going to walk past it, but I took a glance and was entranced by it. It was really wide piece so I took the time to slowly walk past it and take it in. It was the most memorable for me and I was fascinated once I realized it was upside-down.

Experience & Response:

This artwork resonated in me. I was naturally drawn to it and I was pleasantly perplexed. I noticed it looked like sheet music that was upside down at first, but then I didn't see any notes, but instead just indicators of sound and some strange glyphs and cross hatching. I got a technical but musical feeling from it, it almost felt like a program that had music inputted into it but then the notes got corrupted into random glyphs. Still, I felt a spiritual musical connection to it, though it felt jumbled and not as pristine and precise as sheet music usually is.

It reminded me of a video I recently saw about birds making music, how there's music even in places we don't expect. (see video)

I also found a really inspiring video about music being painted...it was very beautiful and I would love to make something like that one day. I never thought that something as simple as sheet music for instruments could be used as a form of art. I think it's really creative how we can manipulate sound to be works of art as well.

Recreation: Experience

The artwork made me think of music, even though there were no notes. This music was jumbled and yet lyrical. I wanted to imitate the cross-hatching and glyphs which made me think of this triangular texture. 

At first I wanted to have the texture be purely black and white, just like the artwork, but I realized that the music I imagined was colorful. I overlayed a lot of textures over each other and played with the luminescence for a "lyrical" lighting and then layered upside-down sheet music, one in black and one in white to both distinguish and also for atmosphere and a sense of "jumbled, yet unified"

From the notes alone, you can't really tell that the sheet music is upside down since it still looks like music, but you notice the flipped orientation based off the symbols. With just one page of sheet music, the image looked incomplete, but with another overlay of it, I think they balanced each other out and came together to be "beautiful."

Reflection

I think it's really interesting that we recreated an experience rather than the art, because the experience could be visualized differently among different people, even if they had a similar experience. To me, I interpreted it as colorful, but I can see how others could see it as monochrome. Illustrating an experience is a challenge in itself, because how does one even visualize that? 

I would have liked to see what someone else's experience with this piece looks like and see what similarities and differences there are. I perceived it as colorful textured music that's jumbled harmoniously, but I can also see how someone else might see it as silent and chaotic. 

If I had done this again, I think I would've split my experience in half, one with the colorful jumbled side and one with a black and white theme that was corrupted and chaotic so that I could give both sides of my experience.

I really love visualization projects because I really like drawing. Overall I'm really happy with my work and I really do love the atmosphere my work gives off. Though I feel other people might not interpret it the same way as me, I feel music is colorful.