7 Songs in 12 Colors
Nate Cepis
7 Songs in 12 Colors was born from ruminations about how people describe both and music and visual art. Rhythm, color, volume, and balance are a few examples of words that can be used to describe the two media. music and visual art share the same characteristics, but are experienced through different senses. This project is an experiment in taking music and translating it into a visual piece, so that others can take the visual form and play it. The viewer can get feeling for the song with out hearing it. At first glance, the viewer can feel the over all length and complexity of a song but with closer examination, one can see the patterns of how the verse switches to chorus, when the guitar breaks and when it crescendos and decrescendos among other things. Using only the guitar of each song, the primary melody instrument, I translated the music into a visual piece. The seven pieces were designed by integrating both music and visuals by harnessing pitch and duration from music, and color and shape from visual forms. The color system was based of an Isaac Newton color wheel that was created by relating sound waves to their equal color waves. The color red and the music note D have the lowest waveforms in their respective field, while the color violet and C sharp are the highest waveforms. With the potential to be applied to any song, these seven pieces can be consid- ered the first series of an ongoing project to explore the visualization of music.