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Statement of Intent

For our design, we focused on movement with shapes. We chose to portray two jazz songs, one from the past and one more modern. We chose the songs Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet and Bag Lady by Eryka Bahdu. The movement of the shapes correlates with the different styles of the song. The first sequence focuses on geometric shapes with jagged movement, while the second shows a shift to more organic shapes that flow around the screen. The change in style emphasizes the shifts between instrumental jazz music of the past to the present. The style has been seen to shift towards more techno-style beats, which is represented by the soft flow of movement. The section of Bag Lady that we chose to go with is a very repetitive and round feeling, so we portrayed that in the stop motion through the organic shape moving in a circular pattern and returning to its original position and shape, while the other shapes appear steadily and repetitively. The organic shape orbs as it goes around as an abstraction of the way the chords move within the song. We also chose a mix of neutral and vibrant colors to signify the randomness of jazz music. We chose to hand-cut our shapes rather than use any machines with the intention to match the genre, as it is more free-form and unique. We focused on movement and different shapes to convey the different messages seen in the two songs, but there were elements that we kept similar to show the connection between the past and present. In both songs, softer beats were represented by circles and blobs, while the more intense beats were viewed as shapes with harsher edges such as rectangles, zigzags, and triangles. 

Ideation

To begin this project, we were paired up with someone in the class according to a predetermined list that our professor had created. Oddly enough, both of my professors for visualizations and fundamentals paired me up with the same lovely lady, Sydney Greenwell. Although we had already gotten to know each other a little bit in our other class, we still had to do some conversing in terms of this project. The first thing we did was compare our current playlists. We found that we actually enjoyed a lot of the same music. From there, we created a short list of some of our common favorites:

    • SZA
    • Jazz
    • Cigarette daydreams
    • Dayglow
    • Arctic Monkeys
    • Lumineers
    • Elvis
    • Beatles
    • Tame Impala
    • La vie en rose
    • Talking heads psycho killer
    • Dream a little dream of me
    • Brian Newman
    • Duke Ellington
We did a lot of in-class exploration of music; what it feels like, what it looks like, how it sounds, etc. In this exercise, we listened to a song and were told to draw what we heard. This was my interpretation.

We had a lot of in-class discussions about what different instruments look and feel like. We discussed what shapes could represent different sounds and how we could relate the sounds to the visuals. For example, deep, low chords may be represented by large, dark circles to show their round sound and the way they resound. Meanwhile, short, snappy sounds may be represented by small triangles or squares to visually portray their sharpness.

The next activity we did in class was more individual, where we chose our own song and similarly drew what we heard. For mine, I used the ending of Good Days by SZA. It is a very complex and layered song but I love how it sounds and makes me feel and I tried to portray that in my drawing. I used colors and shapes that I thought matched the sounds.
From the beginning of the project, we both agreed that we wanted to do stop motion. At this point in the year, we had been using paper a lot and not being able to experiment with a lot else, so we wanted to try our hand at stop motion just for the experience. Above you can see my very first trial run of stop motion that I did on the mobile app called Stop Motion. I was attempting to draw a stick figure doing a flip and it actually turned out much better than I expected. The app was really easy to use and made your images into a stop motion then and there so I decided I was going to use it for this project.
Here is a page of notes from my sketchbook. The top part of the page shows some notes from an in-class exercise that we did to practice describing sounds to then visualize them. The remainder of the page shows some of our ideation and research. We went back and forth for several days on our song choices; which song(s) we would do and how they would relate to each other. You can see above some of the ideas we came up with in artists, genres, themes, specific songs, and contrast narratives that we were considering.

We had to decide at this point what type of contrast we were going for. We narrowed it down to either two different songs that were related in some way or two different sections of the same song. At this time we were really starting to lean towards using jazz music in some way. From our beginning bonding in class, we both had a lot of adoration for jazz so we decided to go with jazz music. We also decided to work with two different songs because we thought it would be easier to discern the two halves. We were worried that if they were from the same song, having the same instruments in play wouldn’t provide the right contrast we were going for.

I also found it incredibly useful to use Synesthesia as a resource. Synesthesia is a neurological condition that leads stimulation in one sensory pathway to trigger an experience in another. There are multiple types of synesthesia, but the most valuable to this process are the cases in which the person can visualize what they hear. This website has several examples that were very useful for our process: https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/01/26/synesthesia-music-visualization/

We were also inspired by the Monsters Inc. movie introduction and Saul Bass.

After discussing our ideas and concepts, we finally decided on a concept and the two songs we wanted to use. We decided to visually show the evolution of jazz music over time. As we were researching jazz songs, we noticed that there was a lot of contrast in the sounds and instruments used in older songs versus more recent ones. There was, though, a lot of commonality between them, so we wanted to explore that. For our song from the past, we chose Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and for our recent song, we chose the instrumental version of Bag Lady by Erykah Badu (no lyrics). Above, you can see the notes we took on each song once we finally picked them out, highlighting certain sections we liked, what instruments are used, and what musical aspects stood out the most to us. There is a little shape ideation on the right side of the page but I will discuss that more in-depth below.

In terms of choosing our songs, we had a lot of reasons for choosing the ones we did. We listened to a lot of random jazz playlists that we found, including different types, styles, and ages of jazz music. We found these songs repeatedly amongst the playlists and decided to consider them. Take Five is a very famous and complex jazz song that we thought really represented the past of jazz well. We chose Bag Lady because we thought it represented the current state of jazz well, and for another reason that is actually quite odd. We browsed these playlists for a few days, and we heard Bag Lady on one of them and jotted it down as a consideration. That night, I went to the SZA concert that was at the Schottstein Center and SZA sang a cover of Bag Lady and I didn’t even recognize it. In class that Wednesday, Sydney was asking about the concert and I told her about this random song she did a cover of and played her the video I took of the song and we both realized that it was the song from the day before. We knew then and there that we wanted to do that song for our project.

After we picked the songs, we needed to figure out what sections of the songs we were going to focus on. For Take Five we decided to focus on a section more towards the end when all the different instrument parts are playing together to provide a lot of instrumental contrast. For Bag Lady we decided to focus on a section in the middle that was very repetitive and steady, but also complex, because it contrasted with the Take Five section really well.

To portray the evolution of jazz between our contrasting parts, we wanted to emphasize the use of technology that has been introduced into the genre. Modern jazz has a lot of electronically generated sounds in it that weren’t really possible in the past, and we wanted to show how that affects the genre as a whole.

Above is a link to the song Take Five and Sydney focused on the 4:15- 4:30 section for her half of the diptych.

Above is a link to the instrumental version of Bag Lady and I focused on the 2:40 – 2:50 section for my half of the diptych.

Once we decided on the songs and segments, it was time to begin visualizing what they looked like. While we decided as a team that Take Five would have more rigid/sharp shapes and Bag Lady would have more organic/round shapes, we mostly did this part individually. For my portion, I was really inspired by lava lamps and a sort of spiraling motion. When I listened to the song, I got this very groovy vibe overall that almost made me feel like I was spinning and rotating. The other elements of the song, like the electric beats and the percussive elements, looked more like circles and short little bursts. The images above show some notes and sketches that I created in my sketchbook just to begin to visualize what I was hearing.
I was very excited to experiment with color on this project. I personally think that all songs have a color scheme for the way they sound so I was excited to express that here. Above is a model I made with a random shape to see how the colored paper moved and worked together.

Iteration

I then began making my final shapes. I drew these shapes on my iPad, one at a time in relation to the previous one. I drew all the shapes that would appear on the screen over time and made a map for each category to help me visualize what they would look like as a whole. For the chords, I chose to go with an organic, lava lamp “goo” like shape that morphed as it moved around the screen. The top image shows all of the stages of the morphing. I chose to make it return to its original place and position to emphasize the repetitive and groovy nature of this section. I combined the bass instrument line with the high hat rhythm because I had this idea that the high hat would be a triangle that would burst out of the bass line and I think it worked very effectively to show their relationship to each other. For the bass line, I did two different-sized circles that appeared back and forth moving around the screen to show the change in pitch of the bass chord. These elements are shown in the bottom left image. For the electric triplet sort of beat, I chose to make it a circle that appears and gets smaller until its gone, all very quickly. You can see the different-sized circles that appear around the screen in the image on the bottom left.

 

I took screenshots of each shape in this same rectangle and then used the sliding feature on apple images to make a mock stop motion just to see how it was looking so far.

Once I was done drawing the shapes digitally, I decided to cut them out physically with colored cardstock. In the image on the left, you can see all the blob shapes cut out, and in the image on the right you can see all the other instrument shapes cut out. We mutually chose to hand-cut the shapes because jazz is a very freeform and flowy genre and it seemed too rigid and strict to have them be perfectly cut shapes.

When I cut out these shapes, it was important to choose my colors before I cut them out. For the blob shape, I chose this deep, rich red because I felt that it matched the tone and sound quality of the chords it represented. For the circles, I chose dark blue because I think that the bass notes it represented were deep and resounding, like the color blue. For the high hat sounds, I did a mixture of yellow and green because I felt that they contrasted each other nicely, and together greatly contrasted the other two colors I had chosen already. I chose green for the electric triplet notes because green is an electric color in my opinion, and it needed to be a color that came and went quickly.

After cutting all my shapes, I then attempted to make the stop motion video for the first time. The setup that I had in the student workroom was quite unreliable and wasn’t giving me consistent images. As you can see here, there were a lot of issues with lighting and shadows that made things blurry and flashy when played back and it was just not what I was wanting. I also took all these photos directly on my camera roll, rather than in the app I was planning to use, so editing them would have been very difficult.

Here is the stop motion of my first attempt. My_Stop_Motion_Movie(4)

I decided to retake all of my images at a different photo setup and these are how they turned out – much better!

Above is a link to our final diptych.

Reflection

I generally enjoyed this project a lot. I liked being able to learn how to do something new. It was very challenging to come up with the shapes and colors because I personally do listen to music and visualize what it looks like, but I struggle to express that physically. After that part was done, however, the process was much easier than I anticipated. Taking the photos and setting up the set was very time-consuming but with the app I used, all I had to do was download the video and maybe make a few edits to it. I love that this project begins to introduce us to how design encompasses our entire world, not just the visual part of it, but through every sense. I found it valuable that we began to learn how to express difficult-to-describe things because I think that will be very useful in my design future.

Final Work

View final project at Dynamic Page