BY ALEJANDRA CARBONE
When we link visual communication and music, we usually think in album cover design, one of the most desirable specialties for all designers. But the objective of this article is to reflect on the translation process from the meaning and musicality of the songs to a drawn letters’ compositions. The examples belong to typography’s students and they are based on song lyrics. In this text I will review the three aspects present in this type of academic workshop: the drawn sign, the chromatic proposal and the composition.
Table of Contents
Drawn letters and lyrics
Let’s try for a moment to imagine a world without music: without headphones to accompany a trip to work or college, without a melody associated with the images of a movie or a series, without concerts in stadiums or without anyone to whistle a song. It is impossible to think about it because never in the history of humanity have we been without music (Levitin, 2006).
Songs (particularly in popular music) are defined not only by the instrumental part but also by their lyrics. Sometimes we remember them more for their lyrics than for their melody, or at least the lyrics are what triggers the memory of the whole song. Both expressions are inseparable companions, and the lyrics add something powerful to the songs we listen to. Lyricist Yip Harburg said (Meyerson, 1996):
The magic in song only happens when the words give destination and meaning to the music and the music gives wings to the words. Together as a song they go places you’ve never been before.
The reason is obvious: words make you think thoughts. Music can make you feel a feeling. But a song make you feel a thought (…) And that’s why you can teach more through a song and you can rouse more through a song than all the prose in the world or all the poems…
In the academic experience to which we refer in this article, we are linking lyrics understood as: «a set of words of a song, suitable to be sung» with drawn letters, a term which means: «letters that are not written but are drawn from historical and formal models».
The examples discussed develop this technique, that is, they are not typographic or traced signs. We understand that it is essential knowledge in the training of a visual communication designer. These are compound shapes, more adaptable than other shapes and that allow retouching strokes. In addition to the models on which the drawn letters are based, the exercise incorporates other forms from popular culture and urban posters. It is important to mention that these exercises require students to have a previous knowledge of calligraphic tracing and typography.
Letra and Chroma
The color in the proposals is governed, in some cases, by psychological associations to convey a state of mind or evoke a feeling. In others it has a referential character to describe or place us in an atmosphere or landscape.
But these works also allow us to investigate the connections between the visual and the musical. In our culture, these connections are a game that goes back centuries. The Pythagoreans were probably one of the first to try to connect these concepts. In turn, Pythagorean sciences: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music constituted the Platonic educational program. Plato affirmed: “As our eyes are made for astronomy, so our ears are made for harmony, and these two are sister sciences, as the Pythagoreans said, and we agree with them.” This relatively simple proposition remained valid and was developed over centuries in complicated theories about how music and mathematical proportions were related. The romantics had their own ideas. Goethe was one of the first relevant authors to associate psychological characteristics with colors in his controversial Theory of Colors. It was towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th that the boundaries between music and the other arts were blurred. It was the time of artists who investigated the relationships between color and geometric shapes. To support his theories of color, Wassily Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another. He wrote with enthusiasm that “a certain Dresden physician recounts how one of his patients, whom he describes as ‘spiritually, unusually highly developed’, invariably discovered that a certain sauce had a ‘blue’ taste.” Kandinsky relied on this concept when he developed his metaphors describing the importance of color connections: “Our hearing of colours is so precise … Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus, it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul”.
Although it is recognized that synesthesia is the phenomenon by which the stimuli received through a certain sensory channel give rise to sensations of another perceptual nature, it is also true that it occurs in relatively few people. Many authors consider synesthesia as a source of artistic possibilities in connection with the search for beauty. Others, as a means to link “the different artistic disciplines, and even between science and art (Caivano, 2003). As we are interested in the concept not as a neurological condition but as the result of an expressive sensitivity that can be developed, we understand that synesthesia involves analogy, mimesis, association with past images, memory, recognition of our own culture. We prefer to talk about pseudo synesthesia as Caivano calls it. (Caivano, 2011). Everybody can experience pseudo synesthesia when recognize qualitative similarities between sensations of different kinds. Thus, we are interested in the use of color insofar as it is possible to establish relationships between luminosity and sound intensity (physical amplitude of a tone), tint and timbre of the sound (what differentiates one instrument from another), superficial extension of color and duration or rhythm (durations of a series of notes), etc. We believe that it is important to recognize that these relationships exist, but without understanding that following them solves the work.
Composition
We said that, in this academic experience, visual-alphabetic interpretations are produced from a given text and this text is a fragment (verse or chorus) corresponding to a popular or folk song. Although the works are based only on a fragment, there is a metric that corresponds to its interrelation with the instrumental. We could take those lyrics per se, and consider them as a poem, but in this experience, we are not interested in the metrics of poetry, but in the one that establishes its flow in the musical work. This implies a certain duration, emphasis and expression in the words. Also, a sense, an atmosphere, an emotion, a state of mind, a time and a place that they can transmit.
Linking the temporal and dynamic nature of music to generate relationships in the compositions brings us back to Kandinsky. In his writings the term evolution appears frequently, that is, the idea that the world is in constant transformation. In Point and Line to Plane he affirms that composition’s elements are like living beings that evoke tactile, sound, visual sensations, etc., beings that breathe, that evoke freedom itself. In the examples, the dynamic character of the compositions tries to reflect the temporality of the referred song, managing dynamic balances, using white spaces intentionally, arranging the text in wavy lines, generating points of tension, using contrast signs to emphasize.
Work process of Maximiliano Gonzalves (course 2021)
In conclution
The condition of the visible is arbitrary and the ways of presenting ideas and their representations are never complete and obey symbolic operations in order to produce meaning. Thus, the same song can be expressed in a simple or complex language, in more or less dynamic structures, in traditional or more innovative ways. Song texts trigger different memories and emotions in each student and therefore the experiences they evoke are divergent.
BIBLIOGRAPY
Caivano, J (2003). Sinestesia visual y auditiva: la relación entre color y sonido desde un enfoque semiótico. Signis 4. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Caivano, J (2011). Sinestesia cromáticas como figuras retóricas visuales. Retorica del visible. Roma: Aracne Editrice.
Kandinsky, V (1996). De lo espiritual en el arte. Barcelona: Paidós.
Kandinsky, V (1996). Punto y línea sobre el plano. Barcelona: Paidós.
Levitin, D (2006). This is your brain on music: The science of a human obsession. NewYork: Dutton.
Meyerson, H (1996). Who put the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, lyricist. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Simulation of what the painter might have heard while painting his famous canvases.
