Experiment 6

How music is visualised through sheet music and sound waves 

john lennon- imagine

For this experiment i have chosen 'John Lennon-imagine' with the sheet music for piano and guitar. If you don't know how to read sheet music it looks like a bunch of letters, numbers, dots and lines all over the page. If you do not know how sheet music works you can see but can't visualise the different notes and tempo. However if you can read sheet music you can visualise the notes (long or short), chords and rhythm/ tempo without playing the piano or guitar.

A picture was found of a flock of birds on a power line taken by Paulo Pinto for the Brazilian newspaper "O Estado de São Paulo" and later turned into a notes like piano sheet music made by Jarbas Agnelli

When i first look at the image music notes aren't the first thing that comes to mind but just a casual landscape view of bird on wire. But coming from a musically trained background you can translate the birds position into sheet music

If i take the aspect of using birds and turning it into a score of music notes,and reverse the process by turning the a score from the John Lennon "Imagne" sheet music i can turn it into visualisation using birds and nature.

[insert music notes into bird/Nature drawing]

You can also visualise music through sound waves which is more of a digital aspect of seeing the whole piece of music. I used a website called "SoundViz" which let me turn John Lennon song "Imagine" into sound waves but more of an artistic way by changing the overall sound wave shape and how its viewed 

With every song is a unique sound wave and looking at different sound waves I’m able to tell the quality and structure of a song.

Looking at this sound wave of a rap song in 2014 “Soul food” by Logic, i can see that there are higher frequency levels almost equally levelled. This means there is a constant level sound where the song is pacing but drops in the middle where there are less sounds used and then the frequency level come straight back up pacing near enough to end of the son till it dies out.

^Soul food sound wave^

Comparing “Soul Food” to “Image” i can see a big difference between the two song structures and quality of sound. Where the song “Imagine” is much softer less harsh sounding and much older, the frequency levels aren’t high meaning its either a bad quality or a song with limited instrument sounds. 

^Imagine sound wave^

From these sound waves i created my own visual sound waves in a similar wave form to the song "Imagine" & "Soul food" using different ways to recreate a sound wave shape.

Using the concept Jarbas Agnelli used when turning a picture of birds into musical notes, i have decided to do the opposite. Using the sheet music to “imagine” i’ve drawn out a scene where the note heads are replace with birds, which almost creates a hidden message no one would be able to understand unless they understood the visual concept of sheet music.

Another form of sound waves I've seen is a moving sound wave from using different visual equalisers on a computer media player. 

Using “iTunes” I’m able to use a visualiser mode, where it uses the sound waves from the chosen song showing through a visual equaliser. Using “Quicktime player” i was able to record me using the “iTunes” visualiser of the song “Imagine” where it showed different wave form patterns, so when the song kicked in the sound waves through the visualiser expand and change according to the song pattern.