See Hear

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Do you listen to music? Though I consider myself visually-oriented person, I am something of an audiophile. Along with appreciating music, our sense of hearing has always fascinated me in a number of ways. It is arguably more instrumental to human communication and meaning-making in terms of the richness and variety of the details it supplies our consciousness. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but consider the written word like a single voice speaking (though that does not include valuable features like pitch, tempo, tone, etc.). Now consider a chorus. How would you go about showing that visually in a way that didn’t look like a stack of sheet music?

These and other thoughts – like updating my music collection to include digital copies of many records and CD’s – were sluicing around my brainpan while I produced this image. Strangely enough, I found the end result very readable, after a fashion. Moving through its elements from left to right, it tells a simple story of the transition from analog to digital, gramophone to compact disk, acoustic to electric wave. Taken altogether is where I believe the composition communicates on the level of pitch, tone, and emotion, like a song might with the mixing of several elements. While it’s a totally different ballgame for synaesthetes, I felt like I’d managed, after a fashion, to see how I hear.