The Sound of Drawing

We just finished a week long project where we had to translate a music score and the sound of the music into a graphic representation. We had to show every single note.
My group got Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' - the 1st movement.



Listening to it i didn't feel any particular emotion, other than i just wanted to lie there and carry on listening. It reminded me of watching Space Odyssey 2001 or one of the old Windows screensavers of a starfield - not much goes on but you go into a trance and can't tear your gaze away.

So above is one of my sketchbook pages - where i realised that the dynamics and visuals of constellations and the universe are very similar to musical notation. I used the below passage to organise the different notes by pitch and length - by translating the cosmic vocabulary into musical vocabulary.



This is a sketch from above of a downward spiral of all the bass clef staff notes. I chose mountain shapes because if you listen only to the bassline the notes carry through the whole bar usually and you are lead along - it's like letting your eyes wander over a mountain range - you don't jump from peak to peak, you follow all the conoturs in a long sweep. This is how the bass notes present themselves to the listener.
Where one mountain is shown to be inside another represents chords. The white solid mountains represent sharp notes.

I chose a spiral because for a few reasons:
1.it's continuing repetitive shape, and the piece of music is a continuing repetitive sound.
2. it encourages a trance-like gazing reaction from viewers.
3. it's a common feature within the cosmos, in arrangements of stars and galaxies and is a recogniseable shot in many space films.


In the workshop on the final day of the project we grouped together and my group made an installation. I assigned a colour to each note of the bass line and made every single one into a paper mountain. We used a blue/grey space colour scheme overall.

Waiting for photos...