Sound Visualization

Sixian Yu

In Cold Blood – Alt-J

https://music.163.com/#/song?id=468738947

“Crying zeros and I’m hearing one one ones
 
Cut my somersault, sign my backflip

Pool, summer, summer, pool, pool summer”

This song is morbid but lively, like the delirious self-talk of a psychopath, the unconscious confession of a perverted murderer in a dream. All the lyrics are seeming to be listed in a random order, with those binary “0”and “1” at the beginning, which added another layer of madness and craziness to the music.

Some people think this song is about the narrative of psychiatric people of summer, that’s not precise enough. This song is about alcohol, drugs, ice cubes and vomit. It’s not a narrative, it’s a revelry, an inner imagination to morbid reality. Not camouflaged, and at the same time elusive. Not camouflaged because it has been discovered and can no longer be camouflaged, so you indulge yourself, and the principle can no longer restrict.

So, in this project I want to express this kind of disparate and madness. First I used some “L” and “T” on the top of it to create a sense of being closed and depressed. As if the victim was trying to reach the top but failed because there’s an invisible wall blocked his way to life. And those “0” and “o” were used to simulate the bubbles that a person exhales when he is about to suffocate and drown.

Following that, I made some letters in curves to recreate this sinking scene.

And I considered the figure/background relationship so that I let these curves extends the frame, so that creates a sense of tension. Here are the two different placement schemes I used, and I eventually chose the left one because it’s more impactful.

To enrich the project, I then added a lot of “0” and “o” in the back ground so it will not look empty. And this is how my final work looks like:

“Now you dive in

Cali let’s dive, dive down

To the pool’s bottom where we belong

Cali you’re sinking like a bleeding stone”