VISUALISING SOUND
Design: Filipa Ferreira
This project was developed at master in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects
between February and July of 2018.
Supervised by Eduardo Aires (White Studio)
Image and sound are strong components of empathy and therefore they can become complementary due to their visual and sound richness. The textual and imagery composition was thought to be dynamic and fluid. Through the use of visual spacing and composition on the page, it was intended to create rhythm between the elements, referencing the pieces of graphic music notation. Some composers such as John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi or Cornelius Cardew have largely used this system.
Time is also one of the main points of the project. From top to bottom of each page, the time is running between hundredths of seconds, seconds and minutes. The hundredths of a second is the actual number of pages. The seconds change every 5 pages and the minutes every 10 pages. In this way, time runs as we read the pages individually, assuming that readers will read 10 pages per minute. In the bottom of each page, during the whole book, a Brian Eno’s graphic music is “playing”, using the time of the pages corresponding with the real time music piece. The graphic music finishes when the book finishes as well.
The use of black and white as the only colours of the entire book, refers the monochromatic tones as pure representations of rhythm and pause, noise and silence.
The book is divided into 3 parts: in the first part “Visualising Sound”, reflects the theory between the most important authors that write about this theme. The second part “Sound Fictions” are visual representations of different artists such as Mary Ellen Bute and Oskar Fischinger. In the third part, “Sound landscapes” are visual interpretations of musical pieces.
