Head Over Heels – Sound Visualisation

1. What can you feel from this picture?

Hint💡Any tune?

Hint💡💡Something like that↓ ？

This is the climax from the song <Head Over Heels> by Tears for Fears. (I highly recommend the whole song btw)

To me, this picture is the song, and the song is cycling.

Everytime cycling along Xuhui Riverside(my favourite cycling spot in SH), I’m accompanied by this melody. I can feel every part of my being resonating with the cheerful musical notes and the relaxing rhythm. So I chose to visualise this song with my cycling experience. And the result displayed in the picture is basically how I feel the breeze approaching me and how carefree I am when riding into infinite night.

2. Process

(1) The very beginning

Putting my personal experience aside, I started by trying to follow the flow of the music in order to grasp the essence of the song itself. To be more specific, I repeated the song several times and focused on different layers of the music each time. Eventually, the “lala”,”ohoh” and “woo” sounds from the theme and the background music bumped into my ears, and I kept them on the paper.

(2) Collecting ingredients

To start with, I scattered the letters “la” throughout the image and shaped the background sound into curves to demonstrate the wind.

The night’s darkness was then attempted to be rolled out by deepening the bottom of the letters.

I felt my imagination limited by my own experience, so I invited my friends to go cycling with me, after which I got the brilliant description that they felt as light as a feather. So the feather has become one of the elements in the image.

(3) Dynamic

Though with the curves, I still felt something missing from the wind. It is the trend where it comes right in front of my face and all my sense organs, also the high speed with cheerful tempo.

(4) The night

I didn’t like where the dark block was placed. When I was able to recollect my memories with greater accuracy, I decided to move it in front of the image, pointed by the letters, which better fits my horizon into darkness.

Also, I was struggling with how to visualise darkness in a more dynamic way and apply the typography at the same time. I kept experimenting with different fronts until I I discovered the “s” that resembles a cloud and makes me think of a previous block print. Then I was inspired to portrait the sky in a similar way, with the black and white switched.

(by block print artist)