Post 40- CD Covers

The system of symbols would ideally be placed in contexts where people make decisions about what music to listen to. Above are some designs for physical format sleeves.

The proportion of symbol to name is intended to facilitate music exploration as the hierarchy would mean that the first object seen by the audience would be the symbol, which may serve draw attention from certain tried and trusted names and towards the visualised song.

In-keeping with my guideline that the music should determine the visual it follows a minimal design, aimed at presenting the symbol with as few visual distractions as possible.

Tracks with similar sound symbols are shown to the track symbolised on the sleeve to further encourage music exploration.

Post 39- Poster

One of my final pieces, a poster which demonstrates how the symbols can be used to compare and contrast various songs. This poster would be available at festivals where people could use it to help them explore new music as key tracks by a selection of the artists playing smaller stages (or up-and-coming artists) are visualised alongside a reference point of several well-known tracks by the headline acts. I chose to use this year's Bestival to provide the example festival because of its reputation for featuring an abundance of artists from an eclectic range of genres in addition to the big names.

The poster, like the other contexts in which the symbols appear, is devised upon the principle that the music dictates the visual. This is especially apparent in the layout which has the symbols grouped/organised by key and tempo (with higher tempo tracks on the right and slower ones on the left and the keys descending down the page)

Exporting the poster from the original vectors to a print-friendly format was a logistical hurdle as the shapes would gain extra, non existent details when exported to .pdf or .eps formats, with the final versions of anything using the symbols eventually needing to be saved as .jpegs to appear as they did on screen.

Post 38 - Playlist Visualisation

Above is a demonstration of how the symbols can be divided and reassembled to form a representation of multiple tracks played sequentially. It could be used to visualise how albums, playlists and mixes flow. It could be especially useful to Dj's who use tempo and key to assemble their sets.

Post 37- TW Cen

The typeface Twentieth Century (abbreviated to Tw Cen in font menus) is used as the typeface to accompany the symbols wherever they are used. As a solid, geometrically formed face it accords well with the aesthetic of the symbols and, to my eye, somehow seems to have fewer of the quirks (if you ignore the some of the counters in the lowercase characters in the regular weight) that can make similar faces like Futura and Gill Sans jarring in places.

Being minimal in nature, it also fits in with the ethos of the system that the sound is the defining force that shapes the visuals. If I were to use an ornate, or heavily idiosyncratic typeface, the type would become too much of a defining feature in itself.

Post 36- Semiotic Theory

The framework of Semiotics is helpful in explaining the intended use of my visual system for music due to the way it helps us understand how people derive and order meaning from different stimuli.

The symbols themselves are intended to serve as indexical signs. This type of sign was first described by Charles Peirce and denotes something that is indicative of something else. The most commonly used example is of smoke as an indexical sign of fire.

In the context of my visual system, the symbols are generated by the properties of the sound and thus certain patterns, combinations and structures that appear within them can be read as indexical signs of certain types of music.

On the Bestival Poster, the symbol for the song How Far (2 Bears Remix) by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (below) contains a distinct repeated pattern of colour. Somebody who viewed this symbol and subsequently listened to the track would learn the connection between this patterned symbol and the dancey, electronic music and would be able to measure other visuals against this reference point and gradually acquire an idea of what style of symbol indicates what type of sound.

The indicative nature of the system (five key attributes define the look of each symbol so it does not wholly describe each track) is conducive to intuitive guessing of what things might sound like and acts like a rough guide for an educated exploration of music where the listener isn't influenced to receive the music in a certain way by superfluous marketing and branding.

Post 35- Tweaks

In my attempts to create the final set of symbols to demonstrate the visual system it became clear that the rule needed to be honed to produce symbols that were readable (in the sense of making clear the data from songs) and that, from feedback on some of the first iterations, some kind of device was required to designate clearly, the beginning and end of each song.


The first rule I used produced some symbols that were too dark to be able to make sense of the inherent patterns and structure in the song. The base colour is also obscured by the cloudy layer above it.

Attempt to remedy the problem of base colour being obscured by framing the symbol with base colour (on a different symbol). The top layer (sound levels information) is still quite murky, indistinct.

Changed the rule so that sound levels are expressed within a lower range of top layer opacity levels. This creates greater contrast and makes patterns and structure much clearer and allows the base colour to become more visible.

Symbol with amended data range and an early attempt at showing where the song starts. This is overbearing and dominates the subtle shades that describe the data.

This disrupts the symmetry and and essential shape of the symbol too much.

This is more harmonious with the shape yet still distinct enough to delineate the start/end.

The frame was removed as it was kind of an unnecessary distraction from the data as the small circle in the middle shows the pure base colour.