AndrewTricoche_Guess Whos Back

Spring break gave me a little extra time to work on thesis. I still had work in Boston on Monday, Wednesday and Friday but I used Tuesday and Thursday to put stuff together. Here are some updates on my work:

- Decided on 2'x1' canvas for "scrolls". Canvas is bought and is in process of being painted...
- Decided against a book for the "voice prints" and made some discoveries:

I continued making voice prints, and realized with these last four, that I wasn't really taking spacing into consideration because I wanted to stick to a system of margins, etc. I started loosening up, and let the rough measurements of spacing and rythym in vocals determine the overall length. These still need to find a medium, because I want to be able to mark these up to show other sound variables. Each piece will have a unique height and text box width based on rythym/speed of the vocals.







Maybe just choosing frames of different sizes and seeing which fits most naturally. I'd love each frame to be a color associated to the emotion of the song, but slim so it's still out of the way.

-I also designed myself a business card.




I'm still working out the back.
-I submitted some show name ideas. Hope to discuss those.
- I also reworked the idea for the joy vinyl case, though looks stale now.
- Decided on using the DAAAAAAAAAAMN! for the mural. Not sure if I want to include the other phrases, "Yah Baby" and "Friggen Sweet"

Besides all of this, I'm finishing up working out some designs for the Open House coming up, A die cut Student Ambassador pin and laser cut signage, plus some vinyl.

Also a strategic plan/license plate installation/mural/business card/signage for work at MassDOT.

We've got less than a month so finished printed pieces are the goal. I'll be staying late later today to print some of the voice prints if anyone has any suggestions for medium. I also want the business cards ordered by end of week. I'll use some time to design a show card as well (Do the macs have cd players? Because I'd load some animated type on a CD as an invitation instead. A Seeing Sounds on CD. It'd work cool with the mural, like you're invitation is supposed to be put inside the boombox.)

Andrew Tricoche_Plans

Busy, busy, busy. I've been working towards the final presentation of the show, taking in all obstacles in my way. The first obstacle is the most rewarding, spring break. Currently, I work in the HR department of MassDOT, which will take the back seat while during that week of focus. I plan to use the days I don't work to create as many "finished" pieces as possible. I put quotation marks around finished because after discussing what "finished" might look like, I realized that the work I make requires the style of my hand-drawn work. Why? Because it feels more alive in comparison to my "finished" digital work.

Within the last week, I began collecting material to work with and began laying out the plan for the show. This helps focus the work within a selected theme, which seems to work well with the 5 different emotions. While I think I can make a lifetime of work to prove my thinking, I believe it is necessary to filter my thinking to present my ideas and create a show.



Here, you can see my general idea of my show layout. THis will probably change based on the critique I hope to get tomorrow. I understand it's "alterish", though I don't know how to include the mural and my works that support my thesis without going beyond the idea of 10 feet. The idea is to include :

5x "scrolls"

5x Vinyl Case Design

5x CD Players to have an audio comparison

3x "Happy Birthday" works to reflect the changes in soundwaves vs visual representation

5x "Ink Blotch" which relates to the individual emotions

1x Process Book

1x Voice Print Book

(1x Mural, I guess)

I've been held back within the last week with family issues, though I've found time to layout ideas and think in between. I've also collected material for the show, finding large hardboard at Home Depot, perfect for the 5 "scrolls which will be the most time consuming. With the upcoming spring break, I can spend most of my time creating for the show. I wish I could have had more, though I always feel that way.

Along with all of this, I need to rethink my portfolio website and design a business card. I've had issues with the business card design, because I've noticed a lot of people coming up with some wacky name for themselves, as if they run a gallery space or utilize their screen name. I think both are tacky as fuck. I am who I am, and want to represent myself in that way instead of pretending to be some kind of creative agency. I'll have to apply my own formula to myself, I guess. How do I represent myself?

Andrew Tricoche _ Beginning of Final Phase

We're within the final stretch here, so I've begun looking back at my work from the year and refining it. I've also begun working on a title and sketching the space for the gallery. Below are some examples of how I'm beginning to refine my sketches and finding a place for my thinking to live.



These Voice Prints are ways for these sketches like these to live:



Here you can see my use of mark making to describe the pitch changes happening in the vocals. I'm underlining to count beats, and changing the spelling of words to better represent the sound. It's interesting, because when a word is spelled incorrectly, we naturally attempt to sound out the word until our brain understands what we were trying to say. This idea offers a technique on how to inspire the subconscious voice of the audience to speak in tones and accents.

I will print these voice prints and write on top of them to show my thinking in my notes. After a discussion I had with Natalie about process vs finished pieces, I think keeping my hand involved is important to retain life in my work. This would be a way of mixing the two.

Then I started thinking about the title of my thesis. I've really been liking " Seeing Sounds " so here are some ideas for some sort of vinyl application for the show.

After the discussion with Natalie, I think it's important to take a step back from the finished, clean digital version, and do something by hand. I then started thinking about activating the space for my art to live in, and the set up of my space itself. Here is a sketch I have for a mural background.



The idea is the cassette tape will have the words "SEEING SOUNDS" written on it as if it were the title of a mixtape. I think it's important to compare my work to the song, so I'm not sure if I want to mount cd players or something to the wall for each work that pulls lyrics from a song or something of the sort. I think the text should have a voice even when the wall behind them is white, but I think the mural is a way to include myself and show off my various skills.

What do you think?

Andrew Tricoche _ Ink Blotch

I bought a printer/scanner for my house, and I kept working towards my thesis but the latest project has shifted my thesis in a new direction.

The latest project referenced the idea in the last blog post, where I displayed the Love vinyl record case in multiple colors. Each color choice spoke "love" in a different tone, some more innocent while others were more provocative. My thesis focused a lot on the idea of visualizing vocals in music, but while I think that was a really good idea, it felt like a project within a larger idea: exploring the relationship between type, color and composition with emotions and the tone of the "inner voice". I believe when these variables are shifted, the inner voice is also changed and can even inspire the user to read aloud.

To explore this idea, I created a series of typographic layouts of referenced and custom type using the text as its control. While I really hate the text, I figured I'd just use it for now so that I could have something to show my thinking. I hope we come up with something better.



The question I ask is "Based on color (&, woops) type what do(es, *$%#) this remind you of" I'm really not sure of the wording here, but I wanted the user to create a list of keywords they feel when looking at this design (example; 90's, retro, Lego, blocks, childish, CBS, etc.) I want the user to relate the aesthetic based on three variables: color, type, and composition and relate it to personal experiences or emotions felt at that time. This helps survey the crowds feelings and confirm my own perspective.

Same idea.



as opposed to



Is it less loud? Is it more controlled?

I think I want to have the conversation with the group to figure out the text so that I can move on to making a larger series of posters exploring this idea. I think the idea of visualizing music is great, though to get there, we need to take a step back and figure out what we have to understand before jumping into that. One of those necessary skills is understanding how to manipulate those variables with purpose. These pieces also serve as a tool to survey the user and receive data, as I had by showing these to my girlfriend like some kind of typographic ink blotch test. I recorded her different reactions and thinking when adjusting variables in design.

I also have been working hard to complete a painting for Artrageous 2019 which is somewhat related to thesis, but not really.

Andrew Tricoche_Ribbon & Lace

I spent the last two weeks creating vinyl cases for playlists based on emotion. These 5 emotions were selected based on a study done (see previous blog post) that recognized them as the most common emotions felt through music. These emotions are joy, anxiety, sadness, anger, and love.

The type for the Joy vinyl case are created with line and stroke as opposed to a selected typeface.

Yellow = Joy & Warmth

The JPG is a little funky. The brush around the letters matches with the black scratches in the back.

Anxiety was a selected typeface with smudged brush strokes. The background is a close-up of my pizza pan, all cut up from the many pizzas it's served.  I felt the sharp line work moving in the outward direction mixed with the distortion of the rust gave a nervous feeling. How does you feel?

This time, I used a photo of the inside of my oven, heavily filtered. Sadness is widely associated with grey while I felt that sadness was deeper than that, and had a very dark navy. The type was chosen to be small because I associate sadness with a quiet and alone feeling. The purposeful extra S crooked letters gave a sense of hopelessness and desperateness. 

This is where I hit my first wall.

How can I represent anger in a way that isn't cliche? The obvious first step was to define what cliche was, by doing the cliche thing.

Blood and custom brushed digital type. Tacky, but you've gotta crack a few eggs...

In my second attempt, I realized that anxiety could also be read as anger, just as long as I changed the type. While I know it isn't good, it did offer some insight. A certain type of anger is loud, and that's the kind I want to represent. The obvious solution to representing volume was to go big, maybe even coming off of the edge. I stopped at this point and decided to revisit at a later point.

(BRAIN BLAST: Maybe this case should be hand made, created with dirt and collage of materials. Maybe cut type and place on top of destroyed paper. Sometimes the best way to represent an emotion through art is to feel that emotion during its creation.)

Love was fun. I collected materials for this, lace and ribbon to create the type in a script fashion without just using a script typeface. I knew that script was the best way to represent any romantic emotion through type, but I was inspired by the use of the pizza pan in the anxiety and anger vinyl cases. Here are some other examples, where I began exploring the different emotions felt with different color combinations. It was interesting to see how "love" feels a little more like "lust" when the colors become a little more red, or how the whites and light pink created an angelic emotion.

Quiet, if this were a playlist, I think I'd expect to hear Amy Winehouse. 

A little more loving, higher tones. What'd be considered "girly". 

Can you think of anyone you might hear on this playlist?

Still "girly" but feels a little more flirtatious and fun and not as stuck up as the one above.

WHAT IF: For the show, I displayed a piece of art such as on the one above and asked the audience to add songs to the playlist they think fits the emotion. It's a way to engage the audience, ask them to examine their music more deeply, receive information for my thesis, and share music. 

Andrew Tricoche

I feel refreshed getting back into the swing of design. I started a new internship, this one with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation which is really having me try new things and keep designing. Being able to work for a company and feel appreciated has really boosted my confidence as a designer in multiple aspects, as I learn the fundamentals of UI/UX. With this, I'm approaching my original thesis with a fresh pair of eyes and unscrambled brain.

I began by reviewing my process book and list of research to see if there was anything worth revisiting.I found an old reading that gave me the idea to approach music from a different angle. Instead of categorizing music into genres, which often produced similar tones (even with different instruments), I'd explore different representations of emotion through music. Keeping it simple, I continued my research into the subject.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3764399/

Here, I found information regarding the most common emotions represented in music. Here is a screenshot of the table I'm referencing in the link above.

With this, I put together a set of emotions I wanted to represent through music I'm familiar with. These emotions were joy, sadness, anxiety, love, and anger.

I began looking through my playlists of music, conversing with my girlfriend about her own musical tastes, researching the top 100 billboards of today and the past to see what were some common songs associated with these emotions. I put together a list, one song to each emotion:

JOY = "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" - Wang Chung
SADNESS = "Peanut" - Earl Sweatshirt
ANXIETY = "Open Up" - Korn
LOVE = "Brown-Eyed Girl" - Van Morrison
ANGER = "Bullet With a Name" - Nonpoint

I felt these songs appropriately represented their paired emotion due to the overall tone through lyrics and instruments. The idea however, is to physically hand letter a portion of each song. With that in mind, I pulled a couple lines of each song that were examples of the emotion. Here they are below.

JOY
I'll drive a million miles
To be with you tonight
So if you're feeling low
Turn up your radio
The words we use are strong
They make reality
But now the music's on
Oh baby dance with me yeah

SADNESS
Flushin' through the pain, depression, this is not a phase, ayy
Picking out his grave, couldn't help but feel out of place
Try and catch some rays
Death, it has the sour taste (Sour taste)

ANXIETY
Open up now
Head in the sky
Pierce the tongue that keeps telling lies,
Still, it's in my mouth,
You breathe in but can't breathe out

LOVE
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin' and you
My brown-eyed girl
You, my brown-eyed girl

ANGER
Oh!

My disposition is in a position for all to see
Regretless of how it feels
I got a bullet with a name on it
Bullet with a name

At this point, I attempted to turn the mp3 files I had for each song into soundwaves using Adobe Audition. There was an issue here though: the information I would be gaining by completing this process in measurement would be tainted by the instruments. I needed an acapella version of each song. This became the process for the next couple hours, learning how channels in audio worked, and figuring out how to isolate the vocals from the sound wave. This came with a lot of issues, the main being the terrible distortion and loss of information. If I were to edit the song down to an acapella, I'd be simultaneously distorting the sound wave, therefore giving me misinformation.

I decided to just simply listen to those isolated portions of each song on loop, making marks above the lyrics to represent where different things happen. These are the simple drawings made.

SADNESS

JOY

ANGER

LOVE

ANXIETY

These marks represent the pitch and tone shifts taken at different points in the lyrics. As you can see, in sadness, the pitch doesn't shift much. This is also true for the rap genre however, often focusing more on the lyrics and beat in spoken word, measured on a single bar:



https://www.rapanalysis.com/2015/04/rap-music-analysis-14-kendrick-lamar/
This is turn helped inform me of how to apply my formula that I created from last semester to the hand lettered visual. While this portion is yet to come, I've begun collecting reference typefaces to aid in representing pitch and volume shifts, noise and distortion through art. This is the next step.