In order to ascertain whether the basic premise of biokinetic languaging is true – namely, that there is a common, subconscious visual language associated with music – I created a series of tests.

 

In this first test, I asked Danish design students from Designskolen Kolding to draw abstract forms and shapes whilst listening to two pieces of music: Jacqueline du Pré playing Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, and the James Teej remix of Trentemøller‘s Serenetti.  The pieces were chosen as being good examples of two distinct and separate genres, and different in tempi, dynamic range and ‘feeling’.  Participants were interviewed individually, firstly with a set of questions, and then asked to draw abstracted forms and shapes in an intuitive manner whilst listening to music.  The reason for the adherence to abstracted images was twofold:  firstly, the idea of a universal intuitive interface relies on the notion of a deep subconscious visual language that is processed before symbols and conscious understanding.  And secondly, I intended to process the resulting images digitally, and use a Neural Network to seek commonalities within the two separate outputs.  The computer is unable understand the associated meanings of representative images, or decipher that the triangle on a square is indeed a house.  The results were surprising, and were inserted into a Neural Network for processing.  I also made these short videos for human consumption:

 

Edward Elgar – Cello Concerto – as drawn by Kolding Designskolen students from Ben Jarrett on Vimeo.

Trentemoller – Serenetti (James Teej Chill Mix) as drawn by design students from Ben Jarrett on Vimeo.