Julia H Schroder’s article “Graphic Notation” provides a concise history of musical graphic notation and its different approaches/categorization while guiding us in understanding its practical and aesthetic value. While it was a common practice for artists, especially abstract painters (Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian) in the first decades of the twentieth century to absorb inspiration from music, music graphics after 1950 is even more comparable to a traditional staff notation because its instructional nature – to guide a specific musical performance, is well integrated into its creation. The abstraction and freedom featured in a music graphics provide a new vision for musical performance which is highly expressive and individual, something that is limited by the rigid standard from traditional musical notation. During the preparation for our project 2 live performance, we tried practicing this novel approach to draw an overall instruction.
This is our graphic score to illustrate the acting process during the performance, reflecting the three roles of us – performance (Phyllis), visual effects (Yutong), and sound&music (Hoiyan). We three each can read the graphic score in terms of visual cues for action. Furthermore, the graphic score also indicates the duration and frequency of action which corresponds to the musical composition.
We composed five phases of the audio-visual performance, which are the introduction (A), transition (B), enhancing (C), climax (D), ending (E). The three components each have been choreographed to form the overall audio-visual experience and the emotional state.
Introduction: The goal of the intro phase is to set the tone of the visual and acoustic tone and slowly lead the audience to the experience, which can be described as gentle, ambient, and spatial.
Transition: During the transition phase, visual effects will be added to create more complexity and repetition to reflect the musical composition. The emotion of this phase can be described as ethereal.
Enhancing: The enhancing phase emphasizes the mysteriousness of the sound in terms of strong visuals. The color scheme and aesthetics are mean to stimulate a sensory response.
Climax: The Climax is the phase where the performance, sound, and visuals are at their strongest.
Ending: The ending echos with the introduction and slowly dies down.