Synthesthesia

Shostakovich #8, 2nd Movement – A Synesthetic Music Composition Class

by Renee van der Stelt ~ Museum Educator
Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture ~ UMBC

Instructors:
Airi Yoshioka, Assistant Professor of Music, UMBC
Renee van der Stelt, Museum Educator, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

Airi Yoshioka teaches a course at UMBC in composing music, and I run the museum/gallery educational programs for CADVC.  Every spring, we work together to design an activity for her composition class that includes a visualization of a piece of music. The visual activity is also related in some way to what is on view in our gallery exhibition.  A couple of years ago an exhibition organized by iCI called “What Sound Does a Color Make?” was on view.  Airi and I were thinking about synesthetic experiences in the program.

Airi is an accomplished violinist with a passion for teaching students to think deeply about what they do with their music. As part of her composition course, she invited me to teach a class in which a musical score was explored more deeply through a visual experience.  The music selected for the class was Shostakovich’s Quartet #8, the 2nd movement.  We selected this movement because it was varied in sound and included a few lines of instruments that could be followed readily by ear and when reading the score. The movement is brief (3-4 minutes), so it could be repeatedly played in the class. It is at times fast moving, then intensely quiet with long draw out notes, followed by bursts of notes for a dramatic end.

At the beginning of the class, students reviewed the score – studying it for 5-10 minutes.  We then played the music for them and they followed along with the score in hand.   We then asked them to listen again, but to pay attention to any visual thoughts they may have as they listened.  Still, they did not draw or work on paper.

We understood that many of the students were not necessarily comfortable with drawing, so I asked them to make lines that were varied in nature – thick, thin, jagged, delicate, bold, etc. I called out descriptive words that they then tried to replicate on the page.  We had a variety of drawing tools and ample large sheets of paper for them to use.  This activity of basic mark making gave them a beginning visual vocabulary to use in the class.  We repeated this exercise with colors, and asked students to use colors that would connote cool, hot, frantic, quiet, etc.  We then talked briefly about how the quality of drawn lines and colors can connote sounds directly. 

Once again, we listened to the music and asked the members of the class to think about how they would draw lines, colors or images/objects to represent the music they heard. Were the lines thick, heavy, thin, delicate, slow moving, jittery, spastic, fast, forceful?  Were the color they heard dark, brilliant, blue, red, green?  We asked whether they thought of a narrative running in the musical score, or if it seemed more abstract to them.

We then played the music over and over for the rest of the class, and asked the students to draw their thoughts.  The goal was to make an image that best reflects the piece of music they experienced.

At the end of the class, everyone placed their drawings on the wall. Time was taken to review what occurred.

Results:

• There was some frustration at not being able to draw what they saw in their mind’s eye.
  
• Initially, there was hesitation on the part of some students – watching others first.
  
• The repetition of the score with the responsive activity enlivened and awakened the class to think about writing music differently. They responded to the music itself more deeply
  
• Some of the final images were very illustrative, with a clear story line and a high use of symbols. Some images were abstract, with lines and colors clearly representing the overall sounds of the score, or the overall temperament of the movement.  And some images tried to follow or illustrate the score literally – like a visual path through the music note by note.
  
• The diversity or variety of the visual response was most notable.
  
• It was also surprising how deeply the members of the class seemed to know the piece of music at the end of the class. They all talked about how the activity helped them to understand the way the score was put together, and also how the visualization helped them to understand the emotional underpinning of the music.   They all agreed that the experience helped them to understand and see the music differently and more deeply.
  
• The activity gave them new confidence in visualizing something that initially seemed very difficult and abstract.  They wanted to do this activity again, and it seemed they left the classroom awake and energized.

<<back