Author's Statement

by Da Hee Lee

   Music and painting are fundamentally the same. The rhythm, melody, and the stress in the music can be expressed in the forms of color, contrast, chroma, and intensity in the painting. The musical note and the pause on a blank musical paper were invented by someone and are now used as universal symbols. To derive the synaesthetic effect out of the music, the author uses clefs in the music and replaces them with elements in the painting, transposing auditory sense into visual sense. For instance, the author gives the color to each note in the music <C ….Yellow, D ….Orange,E….Blue, F ….Violet,  G ….Green, A ….Red, B….Greenish Blue>. This does not only have the transposing effect but also the formative factors such as organization, arrangement, color, and the size that allow the viewers to read the music simultaneously.  Even with a song which is not familiar, it makes the audience to see and feel the flow and mood of the song in a single sight. In this perspective, the music is not read; rather it is felt and expressed through formative language of the art. The reason why the author started to express music with the art goes back to her childhood. She had a perfect pitch and could play by ear without reading the music. However, she kept making mistakes and sometimes she had to hang onto a song over a month to play it perfectly. Because she did not read music every time she played, she still has hard time reading it. Experiencing such limitation, she decided to start this work of art.

   Visual experience has a close relationship with the sense of touch, and the sense of touch  is perceived, in turn, with an aid of visual sense. Accordingly, all the elements of auditory, visual, and touch sensations are expressed by using a thread. It makes you experience the tactile sensation of the music wave that you feel when you listen to music with your ears closed.   

   A music is engraved on a black LP and a needle reads the melody by following the groove.  Conversely, the author makes a 'carved' LP with a needle and thread. Also, the author makes the cross-section of the LP to express the melody and color the scale. In contrast to digital music that is composed of '0' and '1', analogue music is made of unbroken waves that allow all creatures including human to listen to the music through the entire body. As the needle on the turntable dances following the grooves on rotating LP, the analogue music makes our cells vibrate and dance. Catching one's eyes with the stitch of embossed texture instead of smooth screen, the works of art make modern people, who are familiar with digital images that produce no static, appreciate analogue images. It awakens our DNA that remembers the speed of  the lives of our ancestors.