Me,My data

I want to find a pattern between color and music and I thought there might be some corelation between different dimention of music like scale(major or minor), speed, volume and so on. So I did this visualization of color of a song by myself. In this data visualization, I choosed two different music which gave me different emotional experiences. I used two form to visualize what color “goes best” with the music when I was listening to the music and I was drawing during the whole period of listening.

Although the process was very simple, but I think the process I doing this instead of the result gave me more thought. After doing this I asked myself: How did I choose these colors, how I felt and what came to my mind when I listened to the songs?

The first song is Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which is very long and has the same melody repeated many times by different pitches and instruments. It is clear in the visualization that with each time of the same melody, I picked a different color and used different widths of lines. This is because that the pitches and the tone of instruments all affected how I choose the color. I tended to choose a dark color for a low pitch and an instrument with a low and stately tone. It is a major-scale song, so the whole emotion of this song is bright but there were some moments I felt a little bit darker so I add some purple. What interests me is that what came to my mind when listening was not only color itself but also concrete pictures like the picture of a symphony orchestra in a bright and warm color. Then I picked some color from this picture.

The second song I choose is Sleeping at Last’s Saturn. I choose blue as the domain color because I felt like I could see the vast ocean, the sky full of stars and I picked color from what I “saw” in the music. But this song is a major scale which supposed to represent a bright and warm color. It is worth thinking.