Music Mosaic
This song repeats a five note motif persistently, even
relentlessly from beginning to end. What surprised me is how much this repeated
motif stimulates the development and evolution of my emotions as I listen. The
song casts this motif in slightly different musical light every time it repeats, and every repetition produces a new perspective. The heart of the
song never changes, but the world around it changes. The five note motif
transforms from anxious to stoic to overwhelming to underwhelming to peaceful
to intimidating to comforting to weightless and ultimately still just by
changing its surroundings.
My physical manifestation of the sonic five note motif is
this drawing of a little humanoid alien creature. It in and of itself defies
emotional association. However, when the creature’s world changes around it,
how we see it and what we notice about it changes. When it is one of many, when
it stands alone, when it is small, when it is large, when it is enveloped or
even obscured by its environment, subtleties about it emerge that would have
gone unnoticed. Alien + environment = emotion, which is exactly how the song works for
me. Sometimes the accompanying organ swells, sometimes it ebbs. At one point
the five note motif jumps an octave and for a brief moment brightness emerges
from the piece, only to quickly fade. I wanted to capture the ever-shifting
sonic landscape visually by creating my own motif and placing it in different
visual settings.
The song feels characteristically monochromatic to me. I
like the idea that emotion is generated from the harsh contrast of black and
white. This is why I limited my drawings exclusively to black pen on white
paper. This song works in its simplicity, so I wanted to maintain that
simplicity by honing in on a simple medium unburdened by color. Important to me
was the sense that this is not quite a playful piece but an experimental one;
the song itself is an academic exercise in a drafting book. That is why I have
these images drawn in a notebook as if they were sketched for practice.
It is important that the name of this song is “Untitled 3”
and is featured on an album whose name is an unpronounceable “().” This musical
artist with this album and especially this song seems preoccupied with
capturing emotions that would only be sullied by verbal description. I tried to
capture this wordlessness by having the principle subject of each drawing be a
creature that does not speak but simply sees. This song encourages me to sit
silently and observe every subtlety that emerges intently. These drawings
attempt to capture that same wordless search by emphasizing observation.
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