Title of the Music: Don’t Leave Me This Way
Artist: Tomppabeats
A Little Reflection
For this project, I began my inspiration by re-listening to the music over and over and imagining multiple scenes that I imagined when I listened to the rhythm. From the rhythm, I imagined water flowing, birds flying and chirping, bell ringing occasionally, and last but not least, door slamming. For the piece I submitted for mid-critique, I submitted a piece with some general ideas of what I hope to achieve through principles of similarity and continuity. In my Black Square Assignment, the elements were built on one another instead of planned all at once and all flowed together and connected. For my final design, I added more elements to create a closure in my design and make all the elements flow together instead of having them be too apart to achieve a concept of different sizes of elements flowing together at the same time, like how it appeared in the rhythm. Also, for the design, I chose to use light strokes for the majority of my design to pursue because the rhythm in the song is very light and soft.
During the design process, the most significant steps that I have taken would be creating an effect of something cohesive that falls apart to pieces with the upside-down letter “v”. This was the first idea I thought of for this sound visualization when I first heard the door slamming noise near the end of the music. I find this design to be successful because it expresses my feeling of door slamming and everything falling apart perfectly. Although this idea remains the same throughout the mid-critique and my final design, I decided to switch it up a little after the mid-critique to make the composition more interesting. I also find that the continuation of the letter “t” on the upper-left corner of the design getting smaller and smaller is very successful in shaping my design because it conveys a relaxing and chill feeling to my composition. As for failure, during the mid-critique, my design was mainly composed of three separate major elements that all use similar Gestalt theory principles without each of them connecting to each other much. So, for my final design, I connected the two elements on the upper-left corner and upper-right corners with the letter “B” and different directions and amounts to emulate the continuous up-and-down effect reflected in the rhythm. Upon making the flow more smooth from top to bottom, I realized that the top part of my composition is too heavy compared to the bottom part of the composition because of the differences in stroke sizes. I then added black dots in different orientations and sizes made of the letter “o” to fill out the negative space towards the bottom half of the composition and make the flow of the different elements more natural.
If I had more time, I would improve my project by incorporating more Gestalt theory principles. I recall that Professor Ian commented on my design not being coherent enough from the top and the bottom of the composition and perhaps I can choose to incorporate letters I used from the top of the composition in the bottom of my composition and vice versa. I think that’s a great idea that I can do to improve the overall flow of my composition.
Here’s my design for the mid-critique:
Here’s my final design for this project!
