I created a visual score to a very difficult piece of music-in time-as an exercise to represent sound. The music was more of a sound art piece with some parts literally bleeding into one another than a properly charted piece of music with defined notes. This made representation difficult, but not impossible.

As difficult as it was to identify individual sounds in the mix, I found I could at least group families of sounds into identifiable shape patterns. This helped in my own understanding of the musical piece. I then started to think about the identity of sounds as shapes and how I could use this in sound representation.

I started by charting the music as time, using the X axis to show the number of seconds. Each part was placed on the timeline according to its frequency and became larger as its volume grew or shrank as it became softer. Although each part was placed according to its frequency, I chose to take artistic liberty to represent each part in color and shape the way I had heard it. There were crow-like sounds that I thought looked like winged, warm birds in fiery red, while whooshing noises sounded like they should be cool and amorphous clouds.

 

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