I have been recommended books such as Tufte's Envisioning Information (2001) as a starting point to add more theoretical context to my idea, and this paired with websites such as Information is Beautiful have really helped me to pinpoint what it is I'm trying to do. I'm not really trying to make a picture of the music as such, I'm trying to convert what the reviewer is trying to say the music looks like. Whether or not the images are particularly striking is not really the point of focus; if anything, if the image lacks visually it says more about whether or not music reviews serve their purpose in the written form than anything else really. It's more difficult to use visuals to describe audio than it is to use audio to describe visuals.
It has been suggested that I should look at work such as Tufte's and try out a similar approach. For this to really work, I think I would need a lot more skill with freehand drawing and photoshop than I currently do. It would be a lot more time consuming and perhaps too artwork based if I were to take this approach. I think the whole point of this is to take key ideas and splice them together, rather than create an epic visual landscape. If I were to look into the idea of drawing everything myself, I don't think it would be before the Pilot version is created. I think for this idea of data visualisation to work in the context of my idea, I would need to focus on the fact-based element far more - for example, observing the amount of times a certain word is used, and then creating a visual chart to correspond. For example, if 'guitar' is used frequently in one review, I could make a visual tally with images of guitars I have created myself. This idea may be worth looking into, but it doesn't really fit into the framework of my approach.
Tufte's work seems largely based on facts, figures, graphs and charts; scientific experiments being visualised rather than artwork made for the sake of art, although in Envisioning Data, Tufte seems to see himself as an artist with no active audience, at least in the field of art itself. His ideas and actual theories on why visualisation is important seems a good starting point for my own. I will post a blog about my reaction to his theories and ideas shortly.
Aside from this, I have been revisiting ideas of intertextuality. Within my images, even from initial searches on music review websites, I have found that the texts are often laced with references to other bands, other places, other images. In Semiotics: The Basics (2002) Daniel Chandler writes
Although Saussure stressed the importance of the relationship of signs to each other, one of the weaknesses of structuralist semiotics is the tendency to treat individual texts as discrete, closed-off entities and to focus exclusively on internal structures. Even where texts are studied as a 'corpus' (a unified collection), the overall generic structures tend themselves to be treated as strictly bounded. The structuralist's first analytical task is often described as being to delimit the boundaries of the system (what is to be included and what excluded), which is logistically understandable but ontologically problematic.
So he backs up my ongoing argument that music reviews, in text format, do impose a sense of a strictly bound and limited system. The idea of internal structures is interesting to me, as the text written in a review is self-contained really. Illustration doesn't seem to come into contention, and a world of its own, a visual landscape is created within the writing, and it's the (apparent lack of) consideration or focus on that I am interested in.
Music in its raw format is obviously audio, so text doesn't often translate as concisely as may be required. The same goes for food critics. Obviously if you have already tasted something, you can relate to the ideas, as my O'Toole quote last week highlighted. But to try and describe something, there are often derivative references. This music sounds like this, this food tastes like this. I think it is incredibly difficult to describe a taste to someone who has no idea. With the web as a tool, is it worth expanding on the limits? After quite a deep search, I haven't found any music review websites so far that take the same kind of approach I am experimenting with, but almost all text based review websites feature writing that evokes some kind of mental picture. A picture speaks for itself, it's all of the intertextuality and derision in music writing that takes away from its creativity. It seems like it isn't language itself which presents a problem when trying to convert to an aesthetically pleasing imagination of it. It's the writing style. Is it simply the traditional formatting in publishing as text that is limiting the potential? I'm not so sure.
Chandler, D. (2002) Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge
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