First Week at Esente Music Group

I recently landed an internship at Esente Music Group in downtown Beverly (conveniently located in the same building as some of my Montserrat courses.) For the first few days I've been working on poster designs for an anti-bullying campaign, which can be seen below. I have also started conducting internet research, creating a lead list of businesses on the north shore. I spent time looking up and cataloguing insurance and law businesses in Salem on Monday, and housing and information technology businesses in Beverly this afternoon.

- Ian

Interactive Installation, Color to Note Chart

Here's some stuff I've been checking out since we talked about the potential for making an interactive installation on Tuesday.

Blair Neal's Device

Blair Neal made a device that uses a projector wired to a computer to sense drawings (on projector sheets) as they pass over a sensor. The computer turns them into whatever sounds have been assigned to different colors/positions on the paper.

He gave his code to someone else who made their own version of his machine that works with normal paper. He uses mostly prints/illustrations to trigger the sounds rather than dots and lines like in Blair's.

This is the next page of the manual I've been working on to help show the relationship between sound and light wave frequencies. It needs more work - I should have started from E so infrared and ultraviolet would be at the ends of the spectrum rather than overlapping:

Sonochromatic Scale, Chord Structure

I began creating a manual documenting what I've learned about the connections between music and design. I've started off by relating notes to colors in the light spectrum, based off the system that Neil Harbisson uses (see my post below). I then began to analyze how basic chords are composed, and started translating it into the visual world.

Here are the first few pages of my music/color manual, modeled off of Neil Harbisson's Sonochromatic Scale. I'll be adding more as my research continues.

12 Note scale represented in corresponding colors, showing lighter/darker versions meant to represent higher/lower octaves.

Visual representations of notes combining to make all basic major/minor chords. The most basic chords are made up of triads - three notes combined to make one harmonious chord.

Creating emblems

Here are the emblems I created for Monday's class.

Both deal with quotes relating to carpe diem.

Music Project - Where I Started

I'll be posting some links to things that I've been watching / listening to in my research. This is a really interesting Ted talk with an artist named Neil Harbisson who was born completely colorblind. At an early age he developed a sensor that turns whatever he's looking at into sound. It changed the way he looks at the world, and has been working in reverse ever since he became familiarized with the connection. It's about 10 minutes long, definitely worth the watch if you have time.

Neil Harbisson TED Talk

Neil Harbisson on Wikipedia