• Fun with visualizing music - colors, landscapes, etc
    2 replies, posted
no, i'm not here to share some kind of app or program that does this for you - sorry if the title made you think so, believe me i'd love to have one! no, what i'm going for with this thread is this: music and sound by itself evokes a lot of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and sometimes images from us. we can hear different kinds of music, or different things happening in music, and mentally associate them with a certain image just by our own intuition even without that sound and that image being presented to us together beforehand. some people habitually conjure visualizations of music in their head as they listen. the ways in which you can approach this are almost endless. do you associate music with colors or color schemes? the ways in which you could do this will vary with everyone, but some possible examples: does an upbeat, bouncy electronic dance number make you think of bright, neon hot pinks and lime greens? does a warm, quiet acoustic folk song manifest in your head as a palette of muted, earthy greens and browns? or an energetic psychedelic rock jam exploding into a gooey, drippy mess of bright reds and yellows? and do your associations run on the level of colors to an entire genre, to an album, to a single song, or even just a single musical phrase in one song? or do you maybe go beyond just abstract colors and paint a landscape in your head for each song or album you hear? free-flowing jazz fusion as a busy lit cityscape at night, blazing thrash metal as a hellish volcanic crag begging for someone to speed through it on a motorcycle, wide-open atmospheric ambient music as a vast mountain range rising above the clouds, so on. do you just ever go "this is a really desert-y album" or "this song sounds really snowy"? maybe you even play a little movie in your head set to the music you're listening to; something happening; an imaginary music video. this one's probably the most simple - imagining an action scene for a fast and energetic song, a good-times montage set to a fun 90s altrock number, you get the idea. post and discuss music that provokes vivid imagery for you and describe what you "see" when you listen to it! maybe even post pictures or link to video clips or whatever, if you can find suitable ones, that are similar to what you "see" in the music you post! (or even draw your imagined visualization, if you have the artistic skills!) i love doing this when i listen to music and it'd be really neat to find out what everyone else "sees" when they listen to music. maybe some of us will have completely different ideas for what the same song "looks" like! that's the fun in this, it really is completely subjective. this is really abstract and might be a little hard to explain clearly, so hopefully if i post an example or two just to get this started it'll help you all see what i'm talking about. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzQ5o7b7qf0[/media] you all know this album, i know you do. now i don't know about y'all, but this whole record - maybe this track most prominently - to me is just snow, snow, snow. i don't know what it is about it. i'm tempted to say it's the guitar tone somehow, and the feeling of "vastness" that the sparsity of notes and cymbal-heavy percussion creates in some parts of the song. i couldn't really explain it well if i tried. all i see listening to most of this record is things like this: [quote][img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Unidentified_snowy_mountains_-_20040421.jpg[/img][/quote] [quote][img]http://puu.sh/9FB3O/d270592708.jpg[/img][/quote] just like swiss alps in the middle of a blizzard. like some skyrim shit naw'm'sayin' [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-rtSSY2GQ[/media] all of the slower songs on Jane Doe, ESPECIALLY this song, just sound like a cracked-dirt burning-sun desert wasteland to me. again, i think it's the wide-open atmosphere due to how much space there is in between all the notes/hits, but the oversaturated roughness gives it a much hotter, drier feel than mastodon. listening to this song, for me at least, feels like flying over landscapes like these in a chopper (or, appropriate to the song, on the back of a gargantuan bird!) or something: [quote][img]http://www.theworkzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/death-valley.jpg[/img][/quote] [quote][img]http://images.boomsbeat.com/data/images/full/653/26-jpg.jpg[/img][/quote] y'all get what i'm going for here? get to posting, i really wanna see everyone's approaches to this kind of stuff. don't feel like it's just gotta be landscapes either - describe any way whatsoever in which you imagine visual accompaniments to the music you listen to!
i associate a whole lot of images with music but it's usually tied together with some kind of narrative that fits with the theme of the album. songs for the deaf is pretty desert-ey, makes me think of two lupin III-type characters being chased by a hitman across nevada. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-SXW--qFRY[/media] i tend to associate certain records with cities too though i'm sure that's kind of a sentimental thing, though it's usually to do with like, the size of the city, and the architecture and stuff.[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgLyy_yBpsg]This Town Needs Guns[/url] makes me think of [url=http://butcombe.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Bath.jpg]Bath[/url], [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3hP2GaCHfU]Mount Eerie[/url] makes me think of [url=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_KsCSteDJ_K8/TH_98v_49xI/AAAAAAAABE8/m_llgXNUUsw/s1600/033.JPG]the woodland areas in South Wales[/url] a lot, i dunno. visualising stuff is cool.
[img]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51sJm0c7DCL._SY300_.jpg[/img] The Dead Flag Blues always gives me images of walking along the side of a road in the aftermath of a nuclear war
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