Research Report: Research

As a base for my project, I thought it was important to revisit my initial understanding of semiotics and intertextualisation. Initially I researched Daniel Chandler's thoughts on the boundaries imposed by audience understanding.

My main source of theoretical inspiration and research, in practice itself in regards to realising my project, was based around Edward Tufte's ideas of data visualisation. I am aware that Tufte is a renown practitioner of 'cognitive art' himself, but it is his reasoning and his theories that stand out to me. Tufte (1990: 9) believed that "To envision information (...) is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art." Tufte's challenges of the boundaries and disregard for the limits are exactly what my research and the project itself is trying to highlight.

From this, I have tried looking into more music-based approaches and theories, and came across Juan C. Dürsteler's (2005) thoughts on music visualisation, which is a lot more based around literal visualisations of frequency spectrums and so forth. This was an interesting take on how to visualise music, as it takes away the sense of creativity in writing that I would be focussed on, and masks literal, matter of fact data in a visually pleasing way. Aside from this, there really does not seem to be much in the way of relating music and imagery. Hanna (2008) gives a brief insight into animated accompaniments to music over history, but aside from this there is a lot left to be desired.

In my design research, I looked into Otto Neurath's Isotype. I am yet to really develop the idea in the context of my own work, but the way Neurath tried reformatting written language into visuals using a "language-like technique" (2010) is something worth exploring, especially in a web based context. My current obstacle is how to go about illustrating each aspect of the data I retrieve, but I will look to further develop these ideas in the future.

To progress, I need to look more into music visualisation itself, and determine what the closest attempt to echo my idea has been so far, and from that, find out why. Tufte and websites like Information is Beautiful have brought up a lot of key points in my methodology, but relating it to music and researching the discourse around the link between music reviews as a text based format and music as audio is the next key area I need to research.

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