Month: February 2023

Ninj Tumurkhuyag

“Starry Night” by Peggy Gou

CONCEPT & DESIGN:

For this project, I’ve chosen a house genre of music. “Starry night” has fast beats and also has strong kick-drum parts. For the overall conceptualisation, I’ve illustrated the repetitive four-on-the-floor beat with the letters W, M and V, because it has the image of sound waves.

To portray the sound of the drums, I have created small sparks of letters and to express the chorus where the only part of the song that has lyrics, I’ve also added the capital letter E. I used the ideas I have used in my “One Black Square” assignment as well as the continuation principle to make dimensions to the image by wrapping the letter “E”. 

THE PROCESS:

I first started with a sketch I’ve drawn while listening to the song and created the first draft. To have some idea of how to illustrate the music, I listened to the song, “Starry Night”, every day on repeat.

The sketch and the draft:

Then I got feedback during the mid-critique that since the music itself is a bright and powerful song, changing the background colour and adding more elements and details might help to improve the project. Therefore, I’ve changed the background colour to white and added more details and dimensions. 

CONCLUSION:

If I had more time, I would’ve worked on adding more details to express every small and important beat of the song. I would’ve also tried to play with more different fonts, and editing techniques. 

The finishded image of the project:

In the top left portion of the image, there is a front and side view of the electric guitar to showcase what we are essentially trying to present to the aliens. To the top right side of the image, there are the components of what the electric guitar is composed of. This part was a bit tricky since we weren’t totally sure of how this was going to convey the full meaning of what exactly it is constructed of. In the bottom left corner of the image, there is a depiction of a person playing the guitar. This is especially important since it gives major clues about how to use an electric guitar, and most importantly who uses it. This part of the image is essential to the image as a whole since it shows who this is coming from (humans). In some way, it shows our anatomy and depicts our head, legs, arms, hands, fingers, and overall body structure. To the bottom right side of the image there is a depiction of the pressure and distance,  and right beside it is the depiction of the air molecules’ motions and sound propagation. 

For human beings, any social system’s formation, development, and functioning depends upon communication. Music is like any other form of communication for us. It is a powerful tool allowing everyone to express their emotions, intentions, and meanings. In a way, it is the tool that connects the human species, their communities, and their generation. Since the aliens in the story “Story of Your Life”  by Ted Chiang seem to have more of an organic structure of language. I would describe this Electric guitar to them as “Loud, Electric, Instrument, Musical” it is not much you could elaborate on since they don’t have the same sequence of thought since humans produce sentences in a linear form rather than as a whole. 

There were many complications when trying to compose this final image. Such as the top right corner we introduced the idea of musical notes, which later on we found out was not allowed since it is considered a “language” [depicted below] so we thought long and hard about what to replace it with, which is when we thought the simplest and straightforward answer would be the composition of the electric guitar itself. I.e. the many physical parts that come into play when constructing. Another thing that wasn’t necessarily a barrier but rather a mistake was on the bottom right corner of the image we forgot to depict which way the sound was going, this could have been really confusing to decipher if we were just starting to learn sound. [Depicted Below] but overall everything turned out fine.   

Story of your life by Ted Chiang is a science fiction novella on which the film “Arrival” is based. The plot, narrated by linguist Louise Banks talks about how she gets to learn the language of the aliens while having flashback parts that describe her daughter just like she’s going back in time.

1. In the story,  aliens use the language called “Heptapods”. What differs their language from human language is that they use separate ways of communication:

Heptapod A: their spoken language

Heptapod B: their written language

Moreover, they also use a semasiographic writing system and the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph was the size of the heptapod B. This also means, depending on the number of strokes, the thickness and the size, it can have various meanings. 

2. Flapper and Raspberry in the story have a radially symmetric body that has 7 limbs as well as eyes. And because of their bodies’ symmetricalness, they have no forward direction and that’s why their writing also has no end or start. (You can read their word from any angle) Compared to them, we only have 2 legs and 2 arms. And maybe that’s why we use our hands and arms a lot as a way of communication.