For my final project in my Conceptual Design class, we continued our study into visual music. We learned about the works of Whistler, Rothko, and Kandinsky and how they might have had synesthesia, a neuropsychological condition that causes one sense to automatically trigger another sense. In this case, listening to music triggers the visual parts of our brains to see lines, textures, or colors. I‘m not an expert on this subject by any measure, but if I had to guess, I would think this phenomenon happens for people on a spectrum, similar to if people had a more visual imagination or not. In an extreme example this would be how our fine artists like Kandinsky see with music. For a more everyday example this could be what color notebook you assign for a class subject in school. For me it was that English was purple, Math is blue, Science is green, and History is orange. This is entirely arbitrary, only based on my own intuition on how I felt which color corresponded to which subject, but it is something that has inspired so many debates if you’ve been anywhere online. 

Anywho, my class was tasked to create an abstract piece based on a song of our choice but it could not have lyrics in it. We were also required to write an explanation on our design choices. Trying to decide on which song I was going to choose was difficult, even after already narrowing my genre to jazz. So, I returned to my favorites, the time honored classics, and one stood out among the others: Bad Dog No Biscuit by SEATBELTS. This song is apart of the larger soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop, an anime that follows the adventures of bounty-hunters who travel throughout the solar system and unravel the mysteries of their pasts. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it for a number of reasons, least of them being that it only ran for one season making the time commitment negligible. As for the show itself, it’s radical in terms of television with its blend of western and eastern artistry into this one beautiful narrative of a space cowboy trying to find his way in the universe. Again, all of the soundtrack is great but I settled my ears on Bad Dog No Biscuit. I chose this song specifically because it is absolute chaos and I couldn’t wait to make its portrait.

I first began this piece using gouache on paper so I had an easier time accessing the physicality of the piece. After working with my professor one on one, I made some digital adjustments afterwards. To explain the method to my madness, I recommend listening to the song before reading further:

Bad Dog No Biscuit is full of high energy to the point of alarm. With its bright blaring brass, it has an immediate impact on the viewer and thus I used a warm and highly saturated color palette to reflect this. The beat and melody are asymmetrical and unpredictable. The whirring radio noises in the background made me opt to create these highly textured vertical lines, the one most readily seen being the blue one in the lower left corner. Ripping in the timbre creates this nice auditory texture that I replicated visually with rough, open brushwork. The paint splatters are used for the high-hat. The bari saxophone playing in the background, as well as the beating bongos provide the rhythm, replicated via the concentric circles as well as the repeated squares in blue and yellow coming in from the right of the picture plane. The instruments running up and down the scales and the dramatic blaring outro is represented in the swirling blue lines in the upper half of the piece. Their chaotic nature is balanced via the cool blue and red and yellow creating a yin-yang effect over the background. This visually depicts the rationale beneath the improvisation. Jazz is organized chaos and this is what that looks like to me.