Music Hall Mural

Synesthesia is a phenomena where the stimulation of one of the senses can illicit a response as another type of sensory input. For the Music Hall Mural at the International School of Ningbo Zhicheng we wanted to paint something that visually illustrated auditory sound waves. The idea presents undulating sound waves as expanding and constricting waves of color. Ali presented research about visual representations of music to the owners of the school as a starting point. Upon their approval I produced sketches of various ways we could represent sound waves utilizing vivid color and alluding to concepts of frequency, amplitude and period. After selecting a color palette and a design we struggled to simplify the design down to fewer colors and an execution that would use masking tape to create the white contour lines. Below are two of the initial sketches presented.

The completed computer rendering achieved the desired effect, but it lacked a direct reference to music. It worked as a purely abstract work of art, but in the context of a school building devoted to music there was a sense that it needed to directly illustrate a musical concept. The idea was that the lower waves were rounder and represented deeper sounds, the middle waves undulated more and depicted mid range sounds while the top waves vacillated wildly with sharp peaks like high notes. I had the notion that the ends of the waves could compress into actual musical scales notated with the bass, alto and treble clefs, respectively. This simple notation was enough to tie the visual concept to a symbolic representation of music.

At this point we had only three days to get the wall painted so we began with a complex task of making a grid using chalk lines and pencil to cover the entire wall. The next day we spent taping the undulating lines using the grid to maintain symmetry. On the third day Hua was able to get us six painters to get the colors on the wall. Finally we removed the tape to reveal the three dimensional color / sound waves of the Music Hall Mural.