Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Illinois: Visualizing Music


Jax de Leon just graduated from the graphic design program at SUNY Purchase College School of Art and Design, and was kind enough to share some of her senior project work called Illinois: Visualizing Music. Jax focused on one music album (illinois, by Sufjan Stevens), and visually analyzed different aspects.
This project is an experiment in taking an audio recording of music that is beautiful and personally meaningful to many listeners, deconstructing it from different vantage points, rearranging it, and building it up again into visual interpretations. This project visualizes lyrics, instrumentation, notes, patterns, and word usage. Hopefully these interpretations will provide another way of experiencing this album, although no amount of analysis can adequately represent the visceral response one gets when presented with a compelling piece of music.
Above is one of the word usage circles, and below are a visual of the instruments used in the album and a visual of lyric content. Check out all of her different visualizations and photos from her final exhibition here.


Great job Jax!

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