Visual Musicality and the problem with self-expressionities 01

visual musicality is not an instant product or a cookbook for student or anybody who want to quickly learn about dynamic visual. It is a concept to study visual through experiencing or sensing. In this case we use music as a stimulation . The process of learning visual combines with music enhances the designer or somebody sensitivity.
The morphology provided later here is not a formula to create a good design, but it is a conceptual thinking format for student or anyone who wants to use it as a tool for generating thought and feeling. It is a search for feeling and its form.
From the surface, it doesn't look significant because seems like nothing could change by learning something with music accompany. But we must remember, musical treatment has been proved to benefit young people minds. Mozart Effects is a prove about how musics give positive effects to baby and kids.
In the world so full with images, sound and musics we should be more alert, there are something lies beneath those human senses that need to be further discover as a holistic/integrated senses.

Introduction

Victor Margolin (2005) saw the boundaries between graphic design and other visual medium or products have begun to blur. He realized that many crossovers are occurring at the same pace as graphic designers work on websites, exhibitions and interactive software. There has been a long oscillation counterpart between graphics and music featured in visual culture phenomenon. Works such as cover designs, promotional posters, music videos and light art through the production of live music performances have appeared as an exploration of sound visualization in the twentieth century. The editors of Visual Music said:

… the history of visual music has remained relatively unexamined would seem to be a consequence of its hybrid character. While the role of musical analogy in the rise of abstract art has been recognized, the inter-relationships among early experiments in painting, cinema, and light art have never been explored adequately. (Brougher, K., Strick, J., Wiseman, A., & Zilczer, J. 2005, p. 10)

The shifting of music development has challenged human sense to perceive in multi sensory ways. In an interview by Flaunt magazine, an artist named Kenji Hirata (2005) gave an interesting explanation about visual music phenomenon, “I am very curious about the relationship between music and painting. When music is played, it fills a space in a moment but it never exists physically. A painting is there and exist, but can’t fill a whole space” (p. 40). In the late twentieth century with the pace of development in digital technology, music industry was shifting towards the acoustic or auditory perception (McLuhan 2004) and the boundaries were constantly changing (Woolman 2000). Sensorial to perceiving both music and graphics can be advantageous to the development and understanding of visual language. Lewis Blackwell (1997) suggested that mutual environment in any cross-media and new media communication demands different way of thinking. As well as what Woolman(2002) also pointed out that:

Graphic design and music is much more than the surface qualities as defined by a dictionary. The eye is the primary receiver for graphics and the ear is the primary receiver for music, yet, the composition of graphics or music is also felt by the sense of touch. (p. 6)

Visual communication design uses visual elements to communicate; the role of visual persuasion turns into an alternate language for human life interaction. As our information stream meets a convergence of new media, our language has changed accordingly. Digital technologies have converged with digital forms and integrally affected developments in art, music, design, film and literature (Gere, 2002), while Jerry L. Holsopple noted that:

The influence of music videos has been felt throughout the electronic media industry affecting the production of television, movies and advertising with the usage of the visual styles and preference for communication over that of the words. (Holsopple 2003, p.18)

Robert E. Horn, who formulated rules of syntax and semantics, has mentioned that visual language is much more than just good graphic design (cited in Bob Holmes 2003, para. 7). With this in mind, music and visual can encourage a new approach in visual communication studies to generate exceptional visual language.

Some issues around visual and aural culture

There is an awful lot of hype around ‘the visual’ these days, yet, Donis A. Dondis (1973) believed that human visual experience is primary in learning to understand and respond to the environment (p. 2). Gillian Rose (2001) says at the introduction of her book on Visual Methodology that:

We are often told that we now live in a world where knowledge as well as many forms of entertainment are visually constructed, and where what we see is as important, if not more so, than what we jear or read' (p.1).

Furthermore, Barbara Maria Stafford argued that, the construction of scientific knowledge has become more and more based on images (cited in Rose 2001, p. 7). Many writers addressing these issues have argued that the visual is central to the cultural construction of contemporary social life.

We are surrounded by different sorts of visual technologies such as photography, video, television, digital graphics, paintings and sculptures, where some writers believe that the visual is the most fundamental of all senses. Fyfe and Law claimed that depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them (ibid., p. 6). Information about the world is increasingly articulated visually. Mirzoeff explained that visual images are more common because we interact more and more with totally constructed visual experiences (ibid., p. 8). While Godfrey Reggio added that, the image has an overwhelming power in culture (cited in Holsopple 2003, p. 9)

Now, because of the development of information technology the environment changes rapidly. Once graphic design, noted by Pullman (2005) meant flat, static, two-dimensional, but now it encompasses multiple, hybrid media (p. 109). Nevertheless, Victor Papanek (1984) in Design for the Real World was alarmed with the significance of learning environment,” …for to learn is to change. Education is a process in which the environment changes the learner, and the learner changes the environment. In other words, both are interactive” (p. 287). Van Toorn (1997) advises that design education should deschool but at the same time enable one to learn by experience (p. 126) in which Margolin (2005) said that design has been recognized as a dynamic activity whose methods, products and discourse are interactive and constantly changing (p. 290).

Visual communication and the design of industrial products are undergoing a profound transformation as new technologies continually challenges the way images and things are produced (ibid, p. 287). The computer environment in design studies lead to the issue of design as an interactive education (Bruinsma, 2005) in which visual communication design is becoming interdisciplinary rather than a single discipline (Frascara, 1997). Graphic designer and educator, Frank Armstrong (2003) realized that digital technologies have recently enabled designers to create dynamic sense graphics (p.14); in addition, Gruson & Staal (2000) discovered that the design education has been focusing more on developing a feeling for image and form.