Visual Song Structures

A while back I posted a sort of prototype for a weird system of representing music visually. For my recent concept album project, I tried to re-work this idea into a more usable form and came up with some interesting structures. They're basically schematics that outline the song structure - not the music itself, but the different sections and how they interact. I ended up never using them to record actual songs, but the act of creating them got the ball rolling.

It was more an experiment than anything, but maybe you'll find them interesting: Visual Song Structures

You can download the actual music that was inspired by these diagrams at my website: SubjectRuin - The Twisted Mind of JT Bruce

Tell me what you think of these, I'm interested to know if anyone has any experience with this kind of idea.

This reminds me a website I was just looking at.. I don't remember the URL, but it showed a few pieces being playing and had animated lights going along with it.

These are very cool drawings. I think the idea of sketching out a conception in some non-musical form is a really great idea for many composers, as it gives you something more concrete to work from. The problem, though, is exactly as you state it at the top of your page: you can do all the planning you want, but in the end your ideas are going to go where they're going to go. And this is completely fine! There is no obligation to stick to some preconceived scheme -- the scheme is just a starting point, I believe, something that gives a framework within which your musical sensibilities can work (or a framework to wander from, should your intuitions tell you to do so).

In fact there are some professional composers who have an even more elaborate and precise method of drawing up sketches before starting a piece. One composer, whose name escapes me at the moment, draws pieces on graph paper, and the horizontal aspect (somehow) represents time and the vertical aspect (somehow, even more fuzzily) represents pitch content.

This graph paper technique sounds interesting - I wonder how well it works. My drawings were more for inspiration and general ideas than specific musical notation, and like you said, it's probably a good thing the songs wandered teh way they did.

It is an interesting concept - and one that can definately garner some surprising results. Am I correct in understanding you simply use them as your pre-compositional sketch, and extract standard notational music from it? Have you thought of giving the performers the pictures themselves, and conduting through it?

I suppose this may not be the direction you're interested in, but some writers (myself included) find the extraction of spontaneous music more interesting than dry performances. Giving the performers a visual representation of the piece, with the conductor indicating duration of sections, or orchetration, dynamics, density, etc dramatically liberates the performer/composer allowing for wildly creative moments...

Something to consider...check out Anthony Braxton, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Butch Morris

...

This reminds me a website I was just looking at.. I don't remember the URL, but it showed a few pieces being playing and had animated lights going along with it.

Maybe it was this site: http://www.musanim.com/mam/mam.html