Structural Components
The way a phrase is shaped, the supporting harmonies, the different instruments used, all contribute to the vast amount of structural information in a musical work. This shapes the emotional experience we derive from listening to it.
Although we perceive and react to this structure on a deeper level, the detail generally remains elusive. I appreciate that it isn't necessary to be fully aware of musical structure to enjoy listening to music, however the capacity for a 3 dimensional visual representation of musical structure to provide its own visual beauty and fascination is what intrigues me. It can also reveal the musical architecture for those who are interested in the more academic aspects of a musical work. These aspects include:
- Key structure: The foundation upon which a work is constructed. The intention is to reveal not only that there has been a key change from x to y, but also by embedding a visual metaphor within the architecture itself, explain the harmonic relationship between the keys.
- Chord progression: Similar to key changes, the representation of chord progression is built into the visual architecture of the musical line. Again, this is embedded with a visual metaphor that defines the relationships between, for example, chords I - IV - V. These visual metaphors will be designed, as with key structure, to engage the mathematical relationships that exist within interval relationships to explaining our aesthetic preferences behind harmonic progressions.
- Phrasing: The identification of the melodic line(s) and its movement between instruments. Shape of the phrasing on both a local thematic level as well as in a broader structural narrative.
The intention is to inform all the imagery with primarily the information derived from the music itself. As I have discovered with D-F-R, this is more complicated than I originally expected and I only managed to include some of the aspects I have defined through pitch, acoustics and structure into this work.
The main issues being how to generate a visual context within which the entire landscape is constructed and traversed. Decisions about what will constitute the voice paths, which in the case of D-F-R are crystal structures emerging from a rocky outcrop on a red glowing planet floating in space, are obviously not informed by the music itself. The issue of context, and choreography, ie: what directions the paths take and how they move around each other, still remain the subjective prerogative of the artist. In fact, despite the limitations imposed by creating a translative form of music visualisation, the freedoms that remain to inform the imagery easily surpass the restrictions.