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Zaddy's thread - watercolors because I have a scanner.

Started by ZaidaZadkiel, July 18, 2011, 08:16:16 AM

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ZaidaZadkiel

SO I decided to make this thread in order to ramble some more about the drawings i posted elsewhere.

These:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v91/Zadkiel/2011-07-17-144950.jpg

The image is really bad quality, I'm sorry.
SO what is it ?

It's my first attempt to draw sound. It's still a work in progress.
Like all representations of sound, it is somehow encoded in there.
However, I'm not a musician nor a sound-engineer type of person. So I don't know the nuts-and-bolts of sound encoding, I don't know how to translate from "idea" to instrument, for example, so all that information which could be necessary is simply not there.

Where did it came from ?

Long time ago I had an intuition for encoding sound into paper. The traditional note-writting system with the funny rounds and sticks looks ugly and boring. So I wondered, if there's a way to make the visual representation more pretty, perhaps even as pretty as the music it's encoding.
So I decided there ought to be a way.

How does it sound ?
I have no clue :D

Hints:
- The thick line represents a bass sound, the light line represents a light sound.
- The relative movement from a shape to another gives it's tune. i.e. squggly lines go like "din-dun-din-dun"
- Spaces between shapes are silences
- Round shapes sound like when an ambulance passes by (doppler effect?)
- Lines which "split" from a bigger shape are like little voices which keep singing even when everybody else goes silent.

I did this thread to not hijack the other.
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Pharaun

I really liked the hint section included with this. I had a friend who was attempting to express music in a more creative written format. He got frustrated and quit.
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Taka

actually i liked the drawings better without trying to understand the hints while looking at them. i get a feeling of what the picture should sound like just by looking at it

they're good, please draw more
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Pica Pica

I like 'em.
I like the way you use the shapes to suggest unity between the touch that creates the sound - the sound itself - the hearer of the sound - the pen that draws - to a visual representation of the sound - to my eyes .... that whole unity thing is something I very enjoy.
'For the circle may be squared with rising and swelling.' Kit Smart
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ZaidaZadkiel



I have learned more things.

Most important, I realized that the drawing is not only the shapes of the sound, but also the structure of it.
The spatial organization is the representation of the relationship between a note and every other.

So for example, rhythmic loops would look like a pattern


And there's a very funny tendency to draw from left to right, which is school's fault cuz they Never liked it when I wrote from right to left. Them basthers.
ANYWAY


Doing a whole song will take a poster-size paper, and it'll be filled with millimetric detail.
I mean, this thing isn't even a complete sound-pattern in the song! It'd be like 2 seconds or so.
Now imagine if I tried to do some 40 minutes long Progmetal epic song. omaigawd.


The directions of the elements in the drawing depends on where they're going in the song, so it's a bit of interpreting the song, and giving it arbitrary meaning. Because for example, some sounds spiral and some other sounds go straight somewhere, but it's hard to tell which ones are which and why. I just intuit it.


The overlapping shapes are because two stories are crossing somehow. For example, this feats a long, smooth and twisting sound. I suppose it's like a violin. In the twisty sound's path it happens to pass by where the rhythmic sound happens. The problem is whether these things happen at the same time or not, I'm not sure how to represent it.


This was an attempt to draw voice.
For some reason, voice and distorted guitars seem REALLY hard to draw. The guitars have a very coarse texture which I don't know if I'm able to get right, besides the texture is defined, as in, the vibrations of the strings or so. Whatever it is that causes the guitars to do that electric sound.
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Taka

thinking about it, there might actually exist more than just a few people who'd be able to play your music from those pictures. i'm no good at it, but i've met people who could play colors and such
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ZaidaZadkiel

If anybody knows enough about making music and sounds and so,
I'd like you to send me a message to see if you can help me to figure out some stuff bout the drawings,
and in particular, see if you can put sound to my drawings.

I'm willing to pay in cookies.
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ativan

#8
When I used to use a sound board or mixer some say, there are leds that will let you know what certainlevels of stuff are.

On a good night, small auditorium, I new it was perfect when the lights would look like they were dancing.

On the other hand, you have cookies and didn't tell us?

*with my tiny shaking hand out, begging*
Ativan
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ativan

They're to short, the time element doesn't appear to be there. They just look like sounds. a Second or Two long.

could you put approximations of what they would sound like, using your mouth and then writing that sound as we should see it in the drawings.
Like children sing the parts of songs that are just instrumental?

I've worked with guitar players to punch up some songs into a more metal sound by using a drawing style they each could understand.
I didn't do it a lot, but I did use symbol elements I liked and the other players could also understand. But a lot of it was also me imitating what I wanted to hear by making the sound with my mouth also. And lots of hand gestures.

Properly written music is the musical version of a math equation that makes sound. But it's also about as interesting to me as math. Although I might be able to do that with math equations. Time into sounds equations to be able to see them on a xyz graph? I've seen that before....jumbled looking.

Gotta cookie?
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Kinkly

I can read music and I have played around with .wav sound editing on the computer in my youth combining those 2 ideas I can imagine what some of those images wound sound like but only as far as pitch and volume are concerned basically the higher the black bit or whatever colour I'm reading the higher the pitch and the larger the line / blob the louder it is. I read each image left to right but have no idea how long each sound would take some of your pictures would need more then one instrument to play as there are different parts.
I don't want to be a man there from Mars
I'd Like to be a woman Venus looks beautiful
I'm enjoying living on Pluto, but it is a bit lonely
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Pharaun

I've always liked looking at watercolors but it seems to be a left to the side medium.  Broken Heart is my favorite of this trio because I really like the look of the heart. Also the second I saw it I thought of the end of The Ocarina of Time.
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Lisbeth

"Anyone who attempts to play the 'real transsexual' card should be summarily dismissed, as they are merely engaging in name calling rather than serious debate."
--Julia Serano

http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2011/09/transsexual-versus-transgender.html
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