I chose some more colourful examples of graphic notation to inform my research, as they bore the most resemblance to Yellow, Red, Blue. Kandinsky was an advocate for art's spiritual potential, linking colour to music. Musically, the emotional colour theory linking blue to sadness, for example, would be represented as a minor chord. However, harmony isn't as important as other elements in sound design, so I will use it sparingly. Graphic scores tie in with my initial interpretations of Kandinsky's artwork - both ultimately represent the human experience. In a similar fashion to how John Cage's 4'33' illuminates the pervasiveness of unique, moment-specific sound in the absence of intentional music, performances that come from graphic notation are dependent entirely on the musician as a person in the duration and headspace of that performance.
Kandinsky described his artworks in musical terms, referring to them as "improvisations" and "compositions". He also believed that the most important elements of visual abstraction were formal things like composition, contrast and colour balance, rather than subject matter. To this end, he theorised much about the similarities between art and music in sharing one purpose: to elicit emotion.
In one of our recent sessions with James we were shown William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, wherein we hear the result of an attempted digitisation of a piece recorded on old flaking tape as it passes through repeatedly, falling apart with each repetition. Towards the end of the track, we hear almost percussive sounds as opposed to the warm, mellow pad sounds heard at the beginning. The contrast between these warm and plucking sounds is very evocative of Kandinsky's artwork, in that our eyes move from the eye-catching black lines to the yellow glow and vice versa. The piece also sounds as poignant as its context of being released after the September 11 attack, suggesting that nothing will ever be the same again. I believe using musical elements sparingly, such as in this piece, would be a good way to go about representing colours in my chosen artwork.
When I think about the yellows used in the artwork, I'm reminded of this scene from Pixar's Inside Out wherein Riley is first born, and Joy is the first emotion she experiences. Something about the hazy fade-in-from-white and the high-register, angelic qualities to the music as these soft strings make way for the film's piano leitmotif, there's just such a strong thematic link. New beginnings, someone's whole life awaiting them, innocence. I may use the intro to this scene as a guidepost for minimalistic harmonies in my soundscape, achieving this through pitch-shifting, generated tones and layering continuous drones in a loosely chordal fashion. That would give the work a strong tonal centre, both representing the background colours and grounding the track as I try to achieve a nicely cohesive mix.
The challenge here is creating a linear, narrative representation of a static image - but a way to stretch out the concept is using one's chronological path of vision around the image to structure the soundscape. In my first post, I outlined the initial way I "read" the artwork, and below I've outlined the list of sounds I will record & use.
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