Linda’s Musical Visual Diagram
I did a little more research into the creative processes of Linda Perhacs and I came across an image of a diagram, or musical map. This image shows her notes on how she experienced the ideas for one of her songs.
https://kenleephotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/songoftheplanets-graphicarrangement.jpg
Above and below are two images of Linda’s scribblings, drawings of her synesthesia, recollections and notes building her musical works. This is the first time I have seen a visual diagram of the work of an artist creating musical work with colours and visual drawings. There’s something quite astounding about how one can contain an understanding of the relationship between music/sound and visual patterns that they are able to produce musical works by implementing both into their process.
https://kenleephotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/prisms-gregorianceltic-graphicarrangement.jpg
From taking a closer look at individual details on the diagram, I’ve noticed how she strongly associates certain sounds of instruments with very specific colour combinations. For example, in every section of the song that contains strings, we are seeing a combination of a vivid pink and yellow, weaving along one another. We see she writes “Strings: to add lift, love sweetness”, along with pink and yellow lines blending into one another and rising along the middle of the page. In addition, I can see that the “synth key” sections contain tiny black circles with orange dots splatted over them throughout the page. The ways in which she creates particular moods and achieves particular feelings work in unison with the way she puts across the patterns and colours on the page. I feel that in this method of illustration, the artist is viewing the project or song as one entire visual / sonic story, rather than a stream of sound where there is a beginning and an ending. In this way, we can understand the songs as one entire piece with parts existing all at once, where, whilst listening, we can travel through and experiences the different parts to understand it as a whole. I’d love to implement some of these concepts into my own work, whether it be my sound and visual assignment or future works.