--------------Jen Hingley
Looking for the point where music and image meet
jenhingley.com
2011
Representing Sound Spectrographs Synaesthesia Subjectivity (interpretation)
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Finding a Connection (Experiments) Spectrograms Language Video Editing In Between the Two
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Outcomes Video Sequence Idents Dialogue with Future Everything Synaesthetic Website Promotion Web Print Leaflet Success Event Conversation Results Other Outcomes iPhone Spectrograph Audio/Visual typeface End
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I have always been intrigued by the ways that images are matched to go along with music, this investigation focuses on finding a more tangible link between the two art forms that aims to seemlessly interpret sound in a true visual sense.
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Sound is generally caused by something physical happening, whether it’s a car speeding past, a glass shattering on the floor or someone pressing a key on a piano. Touch is where the routes of music creation lie in a physical manifestation of a musician’s thoughts and ideas. When looking at translating sound into another ‘sense’ (sight) in creating images to work with sound, it’s important to remember that music is already a sensory translation originating in physical actions. But sound can have physical characteristics, and they can be represented by images.
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One way of ‘converting’ sounds to images is by using computer software to make a Spectrogram. “A spectrogram is a time-varying spectral representation ( forming an image) that shows how the spectral density of a signal varies with time. In the field of time–frequency signal processing, it is one of the most popular quadratic Time-Frequency Distribution that represents a signal in a joint time-frequency domain and that has the property of being positive. Also known as spectral waterfalls, sonograms, voiceprints, or voicegrams, spectrograms are used to identify phonetic sounds, to analyse the cries of animals; they were also used in many other fields including music, sonar/radar, speech processing, seismology, etc. The instrument that generates a spectrogram is called a spectrograph and is equivalent to a sonograph.”
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It’s worth noting that there are a few musical artists that make spectrographs as part of their practice - ‘Neurocoders’ use a spectrograph as a medium for creating and displaying their music - where
sound and image are presented together as patterns. The technique has also been used by Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails to put hidden messages and images inside their recordings.
A spectrograph can be interpreted as a middle ground between music and image because it is an image that can be ‘read’ by software and played back as the sound that it represents. You can also reverse the process and encode images into sound. By looking at a spectrograph of a song, you can identify the musical features, and get a sense of a songs ‘texture’ or shape. Aside from experimenting with the medium for this project, the idea of using a printed spectrograph with more advanced software as a really basic file-sharing medium, or in music promotion or artwork is something that I find interesting.
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Is a neurological disorder that affects your senses. It can affect a person in several different ways, ranging from making someone link totally unrelated things to each other (ie - if someone says ‘light’, it might make you smell freshly cut grass), or it can make someone see shapes and colours when they hear music. I’m interested in synaesthesia and music because if I can define the colours and shapes that someone would experience while listening to different notes, then I have a justification for linking musical notes with colours.
It turns out there is no finite synaesthesia based definition for specific colours of notes, as descriptions vary from sufferer to sufferer, also they vary from the colours of individual notes to colours of chords and intervals. Here are some individual interpretations of the colours experienced when hearing music:
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octave - green
seventh - blue - violet
major sixth - fire red
minor sixth - red-violet
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augmented fifth - dark brown
fifth - gold
diminished fifth - blue
fourth - brown - yellow
major third - bright red
minor wholetone - grey
minor third - gold
major wholetone - black
minor second - white
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Arguably, unless the content of a song is taken literally, choices of images and the people’s interpretations of the effect created by the combination of sound and image is entirely subjective. After looking at different music video directors’ descriptions of how they go about getting inspiration for creating a music video - it’s the idea of representing the song’s mood that seems to be the most important. By doing this, you are adding your own personal filter (as a music video director) to the end product. You are suggesting that your interpretation is the exact way listeners should remember the song. The best music videos can totally influence this for the better and the worst can ruin your interpretation of a perfectly decent song. But the experience differs from person to person.
I am trying to avoid making art direction work that is subjective. By the nature of art and music, I’m not entirely sure this is possible. But by ensuring everything I do is not too far away from being decodable (in it’s representation of music) I hope to be able to justify the visual choices that I make in a logical way.
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I even thought about taking a sequence of photos that I’d matched up to spectrograms. So I could make something a ‘collage’ of things that represented sound.
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I started to think about different ways of representing songs. I thought about turning lyrics (typography) into sounds and the musical track into an image. Reversing the way you experience it. The track I used was ‘I want to be well’ by Sufjan Stephens.
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In the aim of attempting to ‘map’ a song to show it’s features visually, I wanted to produce some footage that I could use as a base for editing over. I started with filming a friend running, and people walking past in public situations. Though after attempting to edit these bits of footage in an experimental way (but yet one that I felt tried to enhance the feeling of the music that I had chosen).
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I came to the conclusion that I wanted the camera to be moving, not the subjects. This is due to the nature of a song - normally moving at a constant pace as it plays. If I could manage to film objects, even buildings or landscapes in a steady way it would provide a decent enough base to think about editing a song’s features over the top. I started this by filming from a train, then a tram, then escalators and eventually from a travelator at Manchester Piccadilly station. The footage from the travelator was the most striking for me - as it’s not as wobbly as a train or tram, and the speed is constant. It produces a fairly ‘highly polished’ effect.
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Outcomes Video Sequence Idents Dialogue with Future Everything Synaesthetic Website Promotion Web Print Leaflet Success Event Conversation Results Other Outcomes iPhone Spectrograph Audio/Visual typeface End
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After spending quite a bit of time experimenting with different footage and editing effects. I decided that I wanted to find a place to shoot some more travelator footage, which lead me to Manchester Airport. After filming from that I made a sequence of ‘base footage’ for which to edit songs to. As an added benefit, the layout and frames of the windows provided a feature that I could overlay to represent ‘beats of a bar’ in a more direct way. I edited each ‘scene’ into equal sections, based on the time it takes for each window frame to reach the left side of the image.
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still of editing technique (overlays) applied to base footage
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Based on my experiments and research, I developed some rules for editing the video to be in time with (potentially any) song. The first song I chose was ‘Mountainhead’ by 65daysofstatic
The speed of the sequence is changed to reflect the tempo of the song. As each part of the sequence is equal if done correctly the scene will change after each bar of music.
New layers are overlaid and adjusted in position so that the window frame hits the left side of the image as each drum beat is hit. The ‘Darken’ filter was applied to all layers to create the overlaid effect. It repeats itself all through the image.
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For each note of the song a separate overlay was created and positioned in the same way as the beats of the song. Each was also coloured in terms with the Synaesthetic note colour I had found in my research. C B Bb A Ab G F# F E Eb D C#
The following pages show the video sequence edited to three different pieces of music. I have picked the same part of the video to show the differences between each song’s musical features comparable by the colours and textures in each image.
Tom Vek - ‘A Chore’
Metronomy - Corine
LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
I wanted to find an end use for the videos that I have made. I thought that turning them into adverts or idents for a music event would be fitting. Seeing that you could edit the footage to a band or sound that is part of the festival to tailor the response to something specific. Future Everything is a festival of Music, Art and Ideas that takes place from May 11th - 14th this year. The theme of this years festival is data, so I thought the aesthetic and ‘data visualisation’ aspect of the videos would support the notions that the festival stands for. I looked at applying the editing process to songs from bands in the festival and produced a set of short idents, which could be used to promote the festival and also could be used within the festival itself.
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In doing a bit of background research into the festival, I found that they had a call for submissions for an event taking place at Victoria Baths called: Handmade: Digital | DIY | Craft. A new maker community is emerging, connecting the culture of traditional skills and materials with modernday digital production, distribution and interaction techniques. Taking a conference strand from discussion to practical exploration, Handmade brings the dialogue to life around the intersection
of craft and digital culture, in one of Manchester’s prime heritage locations.
by some of the UK’s leading digital crafters. Our Handmade Fair will showcase a variety of artists, whilst the Victoria Baths co-hosts a day UK’s only FabLab moves of contemporary craft. digital to Handmade for the day, hacking, interactivities and inviting the public to play DIY culture. This is an allwith their digital manufacnew forum for Crafters, Hack- turing equipment and create ers and Digital Innovators to something they can take away share ideas and practice, led with them.
Speculatively I applied to be a part of this, sending a link to the videos that I had made and explaining the process behind them. Pitching it as an exploration into the connection between music and image. I didn’t think much more of it at first, presuming that I wouldn’t be what they were looking for. But soon enough I had a reply saying that I had been selected for the event - happening on the 14th of May 2011. This proved to be a catalyst that moved the project on into something else - as I knew I had an outlet for which to show it to people and get feedback. I thought about what I could do with the videos and emailed Jane an evolved concept from the one that I had initially pitched. She was more than happy for me to run with the idea and present whatever I wanted - which was amazing really.
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My ‘evolved’ idea dealt with trying to translate an experience from one sense to the other. In this case sound, translated into sight, then translating it back again into sound - using an external filter. I wanted to see if, like with a Spectrograph I can create a way to encode and decode sound in images. This idea shares common ground with Synaesthesia, in that it is sensory translation. In order to do this, I wanted to make a video in the same way, using the same system (edited in sync with a particular song) and ask people to watch it and decide what it’s soundtrack should be. Ideally, some of the features of the original song will be translated into people’s sonic interpretations in some way or another. Proving that images can carry the information that is within sound. I need other people’s interpretations, because: 1 - I would already know what the original soundtrack is, thus making me unable to be impartial and unbiased about my musical interpretation of the image. 2 - I feel that I have created something based on justified decisions and to me it is not subjective at all. Asking people to interpret it in their own way lets me see how subjective it really is when taken out of the context of it’s original soundtrack. It will expose both the connection and disconnection of the soundtrack and image. 95
www.synaestheticc.co.uk In order to get the most responses in the shortest amount of time, I set up a website as quickly as possible, featuring the video in question without a soundtrack. I tried to make it look simple, yet appealing to not put people off with the complex methodology behind the project.
I made sure to include links to twitter and facebook to make it as easy as possible for people to share the project with others.
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Submission page, clean and clear. People can submit anonymously if they want to.
More information is behind a secondary navigation, meaning that it’s available to people who want to find it.
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In order to ‘get the ball rolling’, I thought it was important to try and launch the website successfully. There were some factors that I considered in doing this: - Having everything ready at the same time. Having a twitter set up and facebook event as soon as the website goes online. - Launching in the morning. I picked Monday the 25th of April to launch the site, having found out about my involvement with Future Everything the previous Thursday. I wanted to get as many hits as I could on the first day, to make a decent impact and to try and build some momentum.
Twitter has been the biggest tool I’ve had for reaching people that I don’t already know and getting them to submit entries. I started by following my personal account’s followers with the @SynaestheticUK account, then targeted people who @ FuturEverything follow, who specify their interests as anything audio/visual. Throughout the submission time I spent time seeking out people that I thought might be interested through links that I had already made. I also asked organisations like Creative Boom and Not In Creative Review to RT tweets I had sent. Which was a good way of reaching new people. I also found that being generally active on twitter helped to catch people’s attention: RTing good things that people had said about the project and always being sure to reply to questions quickly and nicely helped.
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About 10 minutes after I first tweeted encouraging people to submit to the project, I also invited all of my facebook friends to an event slating the Future Everything Handmade event and the project as a whole, with a link to the website. This initially got me my first few responses and generated some interest from within my personal network. It was also nice to get the support of my friends from the very beginning - as I’ve always attended a lot of my friends’ art events and never really had anything to invite them too in return.
I also worked out how to use HTML to make an emailable invitation to encourage participation in the project, which I sent to a few studios / designers that I really admire, plus all the D&AD tutors. It was interesting to see who replied to these as I took time to ensure that firstly the email template would work across different email clients and to make it as visually appealing as possible. Doing this was worthwhile as I received some positive feedback from Johnny Hardstaff, Jonathon Barnbrook and Sam Meech, all people that I really value the opinion of ! In hindsight I could have been a bit more ruthless with sending the email invitations, I feel I could have got a better response if I had targeted musicians and composers with it, as these tended to be the people that formed the majority of my responses. But it’s all a learning process!
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To hopefully get people to take notice of the project and participate, I designed a series of posters, invitations and flyers calling for people to submit entries. I put at posters in a few places and delivered flyers to the Future Everything Umbro music hub and The Royal National College of Music.
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I made a leaflet to give out at the event, explaining the project, it’s process and listing the participants - in a fold out mini poster. I got enough printed that I can distribute these at the degree show too.
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During the course of the project, I’ve monitored the number of hits and websites carrying a link to the site using Google Analytics.
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Number of independent website visits per day.
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Submission Days
as you can see, the first day was by far the best - in terms of submissions and hits. The shape of the graph of hits over the period loosely reflects the submissions graph, showing that in general hits did translate into participation. The small rise in submissions towards the end of the time I think is attributed to people who had taken up until the deadline to compose and record their submissions.
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twitter.com
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facebook.com
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jenhingley.com
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futureverything.org
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mail.yahoo.com
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Number of Submissions
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Submission Days
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Future Everything: Handmade - Digital | DIY | Craft at Victoria Baths/ I had been given a diagram of where I would be situated at the event and had been to Victoria Baths before, but in truth didn’t know much of what to expect when I got there, or how many people would turn up / be interested in the project. I was lucky in that I had a very receptive audience, people didn’t shy away from coming over to the stand, taking leaflets and asking questions. Of the people that I spoke to, the consensus was greatly positive. I found the further subjectivity of putting myself in that situation an unexpected weirdness though, with most people looking at me as an artist rather than designer - I have never considered myself as such. I also was approached by a Synaesthete, something that I was hoping might happen at some point along the course of the project. He had nothing bad to say about it and said the animation was ‘beautiful’. He didn’t mind the subjectivity of it and the fact that I had used the term ‘Synaesthetic’ to represent my work, when only very certain aspects of Synaesthesia have been considered within it.
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For the degree show I intend to make a summarising film of my experiences from the event. I recorded certain bits of the day and managed to accidently record the conversation on the following page. Which I have included to show a different interpretation of my work - one that I had not considered until having this conversation with an exhivbition curator.
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with Marcell Holt and Taneesha Ahmed from Blank Media collective Basically, she sort of made this work and shes edited this film in relation to Synaesthesia. She edited it to a piece of music and then removed the soundtrack. Then she got other people to add what the soundtrack was. But it’s like she’s had to generate that interest for people to submit their own versions of what the song might be. So how did you generate the interest? I used twitter mainly, within my own friends I started like a facebook event and invited everyone, so a few people submitted through that. But mostly I got most of my submissions by following people who are involved through Future Everything on twitter okay and also looking at people, looking at those people and then looking at people who sort of had audio/visual interests. So did it get outside your own personal network Definitely yeah, I’d say - I’ve got all the people who submitted on here and I’d say I probably know about - there’s 31 and I think I only know about 10 of them uhuh So there’s people from all different countries who’ve got involved in this, it’s been really really interesting how far it’s reached. And your constantly getting submissions in? Yeah it’s actually, it ran for just over two weeks, the submission period um until I closed it for this, but I’ve left it open on the website. I’ve just said that the Future Everything deadline has passed. For a few weeks you must be very well connected, to get the high level of submissions I was very very very impressed, I followed like a thousand people and I’ve got about 300 followers in that time and um Quality followers by the sounds of it Yeah and Future Everything’s been good, they always re-tweet things that I’ve put um so that’s helped. 108
Maybe helped you get it out there a little bit more? Definitely cos I only started it once I knew that I was involved in this, this gave me a reason to push the project further and get people involved with it And how do you feel about the social media element to the work and how it did go outside your own networks and what was that like? It was interesting in itself because I do Design & Art Direction as a degree and part of what - and I feel this is separate to the actual theme of the project itself like. Looking at launching a website and having everything ready to do so, like as successfully as possible I think was key in this. Because the first day I launched it I got the most views on the website. Like, I did quite well on other days but it was really interesting, cos I think I had quite a successful launch because of that, because I was on twitter first thing in the morning following people. Like I launched it at the begining of the day, I got up really early and it’s like - it was on a bank holiday though, maybe I should have done it on a business day, I really don’t know.
that I’ve actually made something that feels complete. Cos it is real and.. You access further than what your own network is, like you’re in you third year aren’t you? So obviously you’re making something that fits within your own degree show, but now this is something that has a real sustainability outside of that. And I do feel responsible as well because obviously, like some people have just chosen songs and submitted them. A lot of people have actually composed things specifically for this.
What are you in your third year? Yes, What degree? Design and Art Direction. So this is like Oh yeah a very interesting degree - but yeah the works great, in some ways - you know the degree show is only one platform isn’t it for Design & Art Direction. So how kind of, are you set now for your degree show? Do you know what you’re doing, are you like mega busy? I’m okay in that - at the moment I’m focusing on the hand in, I need to finish all the supporting work like explaining about the process and the experimental side of this - which I’ve all got, but because it’s a Design degree I want You did really well, you’ve thought about your product to make it into a really nice book that is like a project in itself - I’m very impressed with the quality of submissions you’ve really. But um, so once that’s done I’m going to make a sort received in a few weeks because the thing about like you know of summarizing film, sort of about the overall project yeah - Twitter is that you have to work quite hard at like your own because I think, I could write about it and I am writing about reputation and things like that so it but because it’s moving image, it’s really sort of impossible See I’m already on twitter so I also have the starting to put it into print, because you can’t represent it properly. point of being able to follow my followers with this account Yeah you loose the content of what you’re trying to show. So which was nice because there’s people I’ve already interacted I think the best way to do it is just for the degree show - cos I with who straight away were like ‘alright, okay, we know don’t want to have this set up - because I don’t think we have you’re doing this’ and yeah. I was re tweeting things between the space for it, other people are doing moving image as well so accounts, my own account and that account. But now that I don’t want to have a really really long film. So I think I will account has more followers than I do, so it’s quite interesting in edit it in a certain way to give a bit of the background, explain that. a bit of the process and then go into this event and explain a bit about that as well. So I’m like filming little bits here and That is interesting and how do you feel about um, have you there and then I’m going to try and.. used social media at all before in your practice? Not as directly, I’ve never sort of made something Like you’re in Future Everything now and then you’ve got to and put it out there for real. Technology is something that I’ve show what the process is and not that we’d make a decision yet, involved, like I’ve done things like concepts for iPhone apps, but if it’s something that we’d like to exhibit - would that be a like conceptual stuff like mock-ups. Um but this is the first time lot of work for you or, cos we don’t want to distract from your 109
other work? I don’t think so, because in terms of this Do you know the dates? It’s the second of June and it finishes on the sixteenth of June I mean this, in itself like there’s lessons I’m learning from today that are going to be very easy, if I needed to do it again like to sort out. We’d rather have it like, we have to look at balance obviously the work is very strong and it’s got the element of the social media that is represented. We have to look at balance like as of what you say - monitor heavy spaces things like that. We’d rather have it like compliment your degree show as that’s a priority. But it would be nice if you were interested as another outlet for your work and social media concepts. Yeah ideally I would have had the website set up alongside this, like for here so people could look at it as well and maybe submit things as well, but the wi-fi isn’t working so I’ve had to not do that. But yeah as my sort of broader plan is to do it with a completely different base song, so like it’s based on an original song that I picked and edited to, so doing it with a completely different song, completely different speed, tempo like a different style of music. Then do it all again and see whether people’s submissions differ. But I don’t think I’d have time to do that for your exhibition. Because I think I’d need a couple of weeks to get the results in. But in terms of this - it’s ready to go pretty much. I’m about to make a website with all the results in it, in a way that I’m going to analyse and look at the similarities between the songs, see whether any of them are the same time, beats per minute, same sort of key. Things like that and then look at it as a sort of piece of infographics. Okay, well we’ll need to think about it because obviously it depends on the room we have in the exhibition, but we’re going to have a meeting on Monday and we’ll have a chat about it. It’s more about what’s in the exhibition to be honest you know obviously submissions closed and then we looked at the whole balance of the show and we’ve had to let go some really quality work anyway because of balance, but yeah I love your work I love how you’ve generated the submissions, it’s a really good idea I was really surprised as well because obviously I’ve never done it before, I really didn’t know how people would respond It’s just great getting outside of the art school network isn’t it, the bubble - which we love, but it’s just really impressive when you tap into other resources. 110
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x John Morrisx John Atkinson
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x Mark Whiteside
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x Martin Hingley
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x Kenneth Moore
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x Goran x John Vose 2
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x Adam Barker 1
xx Timothy Cook Steven Brown
x Chris Davis
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x Matt Keers
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x Nicola Smith
x Shmoo
x Ray Murphy
x Phillip Morris x Alyson Exall x Max Hancock x Evangelos Kapros 1
x Theo Vidgen
x Richard Clifford
x Paul Green
x Adam Barker 2
x John Vose x Pavel Enzi x Alessandro Contini
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Beats per Minute
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After running all of the submitted tracks through a piece of software called BeaTunes2. I was presented with an analysis of each track’s Beats per Minute and key signature. I figured that by comparing each of these bits of information to the info from the original track - it would allow me to see if there was a physical connection or similarity between their musical features. I plotted out all of the results on the graph opposite with key signatures going from left to right, with B Minor in the centre (the Key of the original song) and each key in the order of shared accidentals. - So the closer to the blue line the submissions are, the more notes they in theory share with the original track. BPM is easier to classify, the vertical position of each submission is specified by the speed of the track. So taking these two factors into account (the two factors that I considered when making the footage), the closer to the centre the entry is on the graph, the closer it is to the original song.
I have a few doubts about the reliability of the information about each track given to me by this software. Though for the purposes of the experiment and time constraints I am assuming that it is correct.
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www.synaestheticc.co.uk/results
Aside from showing the results of Synaesthetic at Future Everything, I figured the best way to satisfy the interest of the participants as a whole would be to make another website showing the results of the experiment. After plotting all of the submissions on the BPM vs Key Signature graph, I uploaded all of the sumbissions onto vimeo and mapped the graph so that when you clicked on each participant’s name, the video would start playing in the box on the right. This wasn’t a competition, but it seems like the motion of the footage and editing caused six people to get the BPM right - whereas only one person got the key signature right - a probable lucky guess. I feel this analysis proves and shows that some people’s musical interpretations did have a connection to the original song, and that the editing techniques enabled them to get a sense of this. So some aspects of the sound were translated through the image.
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Other than creating the results site, due to being approached by two different people potentially wanting to exhibit Synaesthetic at different events. My plan for either of those opportunities if they went ahead would be to run the experiment again, but basing it on a very different style of song - then seeing if the results and styles of music submitted vary at all. I want to try and see what characteristics of the original song are translated through the image, so this would prove or disprove that it works or is possible.
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Other than the main Synaesthetic project, there were also two other ideas that I feel could be pushed into strong final outcomes - if I had more time available.
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This is just a concept, I feel there is unchartered teritory to be explored with Spectrographs and their capacity for encoding sound information. In a basic way it could be used as a very primative way of sharing files and encoding messages - as a bit of fun. A more advanced use could be using a spectrograph in a band’s promotional material - to give a teaser of a yet to be heard song. I feel the spectrograph is a medium, although digital - with a lot of analogue traits. The loss of quality when a sound or image are encoded produces an affect that is individual to the technique in itself. I’m not suggesting that people would warm to this affect, in the same way that people think of vinyl (or whatever analogue format), but it produces an individual kind of sound and can add a new layer of experience to a music listener. The basis of this idea is to make the Spectrograph more accessable. By making an iPhone App that can make live spectrographs by ‘scanning photos’ or recording sounds and saving them in an opposite format (audio to image or image to audio).
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Conceptual Type System In order to pronounce words, we use a combination of 53 separate sounds. By isolating each of them and turning them into a spectrogram*, we are able to see what each sound looks like. Audiovisual can be used to visually construct words using the way that we all do when we speak. I feel the alphabet alone is not a true representation of ‘sound’, and that to represent sound using a ‘typeface’ phonetic elements are more appropriate than a basic alphabet. spectrograph software available from http://photosounder.com, eventually this idea could tie in with the iPhone live spectrograph app.
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the underlined part of each word, shown underneath a phonetic symbol is the sound that it represents when spoken out loud.
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One of the themes that has emerged throughout my work especially for Synaesthetic is subjectivity. In constructing the video sequence in time with a song, I was - although trying not to, putting the song through my own personal filter. Had I presented a song to people and asked them to make a video though, I feel I would have had a more varied array of results from the predominatly electronic, instrumentals that I mainly recieved for the project. Art and music are totally open to interpretation by their audiences, I still think there are ways to connect the two but perhaps there is not a sure-fire way to do so without either losing some of the quality (in spectrographs) or letting either become subjective. It is the combination of the two that helps give the viewer a more concrete perception of a total art form. And allows artists or musicians to design a more particular impression for their viewers to grasp.