Synthesising and Visualising Sound with Dr Anna Powell

Synaesthesia

 During our seminar we discussed synaesthesia and it's effects in motion graphics and how a person's senses meld together such as visual movement triggering the perception of sound, or so that a synesthete might “hear” colours or “taste” shapes.

 As for example, Wassily Kandinsky and his work. Music played quite a vital role within his abstract paintings. For Kandinsky, music and colour existed in a relationship whereby each musical note could be distributed to an exact hue. Thus leading to Kandinsky to give many of his paintings music titles such as Composition or Improvisation. He stated

‘The sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark blue with treble.' 
Kandinsky: Improvisation 35

Creation Task.

 We were set the task to listen to any music or auditory extract of our choosing and create a small illustration or poster from what we could visualise by listening to it, what i decided to listen to was a song from the 2016 game 'DOOM'. The music to 'DOOM 2016' is very high paced, loud, aggressive, metal music with this glitch, distorted twist to it. Mick Gordon, the composer for DOOM 2016 explains how he was in fact inspired by the architecture of hell in the game. He states "I was really inspired by these huge monolithic structures that are broken to the point where you can actually see the energy holding the structures together. I thought what would this energy sound like,  how can i use that in the music?" Mick came up with the idea of breaking sound to it's bare bones and components of sound waves and noise, he then pulsed rhythms of the sounds and noise though various arrays of analog equipment. Thus creating this corrupt, pure sound waves. I personally love the whole Corrupt, digital, glitch effect and aesthetic, so hearing this music for the first time was a real treat so I decided to use the song "Flesh & Metal" from the soundtrack of DOOM 2016 for this task.

 Whilst listening to my chosen music I began to draw a very quick illustration that started to become distorted as the song progressed, I tried to not focus on what I was drawing and more letting my pen flow throughout the song's duration. This Eventually resulted in the Illustration below, a very minimal line-art of a distorted face. listening to the song and examining the illustration post task, the observations of the glitch and distorted aspect of the song is apparent, however i don't believe that the illustration captured the aggressive fast pace metal metal that it was combined with. Although After making the observation, I do find the illustration to be rather appealing in a digital, glitch aesthetic.  


Illustration Created during Seminar Task.

Overwatch: Lúcio

In Blizzard entertainment's latest game Overwatch, the character Lúcio is built around the concept of synaesthesia. With the utilisation of his music, people can feel his music physically and become faster and feel empowered. In the lore of the game, Lúcio and his music influenced a revolt against an invading megacorporation in Rio de Janiero. 

I actually find it interesting that certain games use the concept of synaesthesia and this character for example is a unique interpretation of it.     



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