Picture That Sound
ALPHABETS:
REPRESENTING
THE VOICE
Consider the Roman alphabet. Each letter (grapheme) is a symbol representing the sound of a consonant or vowel. That’s why we hear the voice of the author as we we read her book. An alphabet carries the sounds of everyday life, the music of the marketplace, the voice of our hopes and our dreams. Image courtesy of Lindenwood, Inc.
CLASSIC
MUSICAL
NOTATION
Just as words and paragraphs are built with letters that represent the sounds of the voice, music is represented by an “alphabet” of symbols that help a composer to organize the sounds she hears so that others can see those sounds and sing them, or play them on a musical instrument. A published music score from the Western Classical tradition still looks a lot like this one (above), handwritten by J. S. Bach (1685 - 1750). Notice how Bach’s handwritting enhances the sense of musicality we see on the page. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
SOUND NOTATION
Above: A section of Solitude, composed by Hans Christoph Steiner and visualized with Csound and composed in Pd (Pure Data). GNU Free Documentation License.
In the 20th and 21st century, composers and musicians have experimented with other ways of visualizing their work because they are including sounds and performance practices that extend beyond the classical range of orchestral instruments and concert hall spaces. Composers have devised a variety of visual vocabularies to represent their experiments with audio improvisation, home made instruments, recorded natural sounds, time and silence. Above and below are examples of drawings and notations that represent contemporary composed sounds.
Above: Spiral Galaxy for amplified piano by George Crumb (b. 1929); part of Makrokosmos, a set “12 Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac.” Spiral Galaxy represents the water-bearer sign Aquarius and is reminiscent of a seashell and the Milky Way. Thanks to sheetmusicplus.com
Above: Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, holding his hand-drawn “partituras” (sheet music). Pascoal often makes music with unconventional objects such as teapots, children's toys, animals, button accordions, melodicas, and various brass and folkloric instruments. (Wikipedia.) Photo: Jack Bishop
PAINTINGS OF SOUNDS
Drawing or painting sounds is not reserved for the composer alone. You can draw sounds, too. You can draw representations of the music you hear on your iPod. But you can also draw the sounds you hear around you—in your home, your school, your community. If you take a Sound Walk, bring a sketchbook. If you do the Ear Cleaning exercises, keep a notebook and pen handy so you can draw notations of what you hear. To inspire you, let’s look at some wonderful representations of sound by famous artists:
Below: Do you hear an orchestra in Wassily Kandinsky’s 1913 Composition VII?
This image is in the public domain in the US.
Can you hear ice crackling in the Charles Burchfield work, Orion in December?
Right: Listen to the cry of psychic pain in
Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream.
Above: In Robert Delaunay’s 1911/1923 Graphic Champs de Mars: The Red Tower, (above left) can you hear the cacophony of urban Parisian sounds? (Images are in the public domain in the US.)
THERE ARE LOTS OF SOUNDS TO PAINT AND DRAW!
There are lots of ways to visually represent sounds. Look at some of the examples below, then grab your sketchpad, notebook or watercolors and get started!
Below left: Children drawing to live music. Owens Art Gallery
Below right: An ink drawing done to music. danigalietti.blogspot.com
Sound maps are a way of drawing sound, too. Here’s a sound map (above) that locates human voices, animal calls and machine noises. The Clerc Center