Music Mosaic

Music Link: Interlude by Attack Attack!

For this assignment I decided to select/create pictures at several different points in time, to try to gauge the different ways I felt about the music at individual points in my life. I chose the song "Interlude" by Attack Attack! because I didn't innately picture anything when listening to it, and it was honestly the first instrumental piece of music I came across when looking for a subject. The first two pictures I created using an abstract art program, with the target goal of the first to look like a long exposure of a bunch of glow sticks on a dance floor. This is due to the style of the song being a techno/dance song, as well as the music having a frenetic and chaotic, yet elegant feel to it. The second picture I created in the same style but with a white background, something impossible to photograph, to symbolize how the song feels “light” as opposed to dark or black.

I next listened to the song when I was out photographing for a Cameras and Lenses assignment, and felt that the song reminded me of my Freshman year, when I first heard it. Because of this, I thought of Rock Canyon and the mountains, where I spent a lot of time exploring back then, and a path ready to be explored. I also took one photo with low ISO and a relatively low shutter speed to create a feeling of false fading light, showing how memories (like light) eventually seem fade into the past, but they are still there if we look through the right lenses.

The simple EKG drawing I made in MS Paint (just because) to show that the song has a steady beat like a heartbeat, and that life is flowing through it. Further, it is very simplistic, and representative of a regular cardiac rhythm, as the song has quite a simplistic structure and generally undeviating chord progressions. Next was a photo of Minneapolis, where I grew up. I chose that skyline because I think it is very distinctive, then I added a chromatic/pop art look with a couple of filters and a perforated mask, because the warm color and plastic-y look it gave to the high-def photo is in line with the tone of the song and the culture it represents.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Paint drawing, I created this particulate cloud using a WebGL script. It represents the chaos and feeling of overwhelming noise created by the music, while keeping it all encased in the circle, with the explosive elements making up one large whole. 

Last but not least is a picture of the carpet at my workplace. Boring, I know, but there is a point. I noticed when I was sitting and trying to think of a final picture to accompany the song that the carpet has a ton of different thread colors and overlapping patters. It kind of seems chaotic, but at the same time linear and organized, which fits nicely with some of the visual metaphors I’ve already identified. It is hard to see in the photo, but there really are a lot of different things going on in the fabric, and I think that can be a physical representation of essentially any electronica.