Music Without Sound is a digital media artwork that was showcased on two different urban media displays (Elbphilharmonie Media Wall in Hamburg, Germany and the Media Art Nexus wall in Singapore) with the overarching goal of expressing the theme of music without the use of sound. One might ask: how do you portray “music” without the use of sound?---Naturally, such a problem is open to a wide variety of interpretations. This project was a collaboration between 3 team members. Since my team members were of Chinese background, we decided to use elements of their culture as a basis for our design. In particular, we found it fitting to consider styles used in traditional Peking Opera; a form of Opera originating from 18th century China that combines music, visual arts, and dance.
When coming up with the design, I played around with the idea of blending a face from the Peking Opera with nature, but this proved to be difficult due to the dimensional constraints from the Elbphilharmonie Media Wall. Instead, I shifted the focus of the design to have the face stand out the most. After a few iterations we found that patterns too ornate were difficult to interpret on a larger screen so we opted for a more simplified design. To design the assets and the design concept I used Adobe Draw, Procreate, and Adobe Illustrator. For animation tests I used Procreate and the Adobe Creative Suite.
When coming up with the design, I played around with the idea of blending a face from the Peking Opera with nature, but this proved to be difficult due to the dimensional constraints from the Elbphilharmonie Media Wall. Instead, I shifted the focus of the design to have the face stand out the most. After a few iterations we found that patterns too ornate were difficult to interpret on a larger screen so we opted for a more simplified design. To design the assets and the design concept I used Adobe Draw, Procreate, and Adobe Illustrator. For animation tests I used Procreate and the Adobe Creative Suite.
Early Concepts
Final Result
Images from both showcases in Singapore and in Germany