Stephanie Yip
Brutal by Olivia Rodrigo
Concept & Design:
My sound visualization project is based on the song Brutal by Olivia Rodrigo. It is an upbeat, loud and chaotic song that I chose to represent through this project using the letters “v”, “s”, “q”, “g”, “j”, “x”, “b” and “o”. The main part of the song that I wanted to emphasize was the loud beats before the song begins which is why I included layers of the letter “G” to represent the loud beats. I used letters to represent the sound made such as for the beginning sharp, almost sad part of the song, I used the letter “V” and “S” as the sound kind of swirls and becomes hard to follow but still increases in pitch. And then I used the letters “j” to represent the strumming and deep sound that plays after the loud beats and the letters “B” and “O” to show a bouncier sound that follows. I also used Gestalts theory to fill up the space on my design and since the rhythm of the song after the chorus repeats itself, I used proximity and motion to show the beats going in a full circle and going back to the loud “G” beats. The black square project helped me with this project through the use of similarity and motion I depicted in both projects. With the use of similarity and proximity for certain letters, I think I was able to make my sound visualization project more dimensional and easy to follow.
Process:
At the start of this project, I was very confused on how to depict sound and wasn’t very clear on the assignment at hand. For instance, in my mid-critique I realized that I was supposed to use letters instead of shapes and also wasn’t allowed to use gradients. Although I liked the look of my mid-critique work as well, it didn’t clearly represent the music well as it was rather all over the place. So instead, for my final product, I sat down and scraped the whole thing. I started from listening to the beginning of the song and piece by piece, came up with letters and techniques that fit that certain part of the song until it all connected. For example, for the part of the song that went to the strumming of a guitar, I used the letter “j” lowercase and slowly extended it to show the “jumpy” like sound getting deeper and deeper. By slowly listening to the song and matching it with different letters, I was able to depict the song better than when I did during mid-critique.
Conclusion:
Although I am pretty satisfied with the outcome of my project, I believe that I could have played with usage of negative space in that I could’ve used a black background in my work as well as attempt to disguise the letters more into depicting an abstract image. In my work as it is now, it is very clear what letters I used which could’ve been hidden somehow by making it look more like sound rather than letters.