Illustrating Sound, or Sonic Visualisation: A Not-so-Original Exercise

This is something I do every so often. I should mention here, really I can't draw for toffee- I'm not like the other fine, talented contributors of this blog and my interest in pursuing visual art is, to say the least, sporadic. But this is something I do every so often: I'll put on a album, and I'll draw to the sound.

This time, the record inspiring the doodling was 'These Four Walls' by the Scottish wonders We Were Promised Jetpacks, and these are the four drawings I came up with:

It's Thunder and it's Lightning "I have to say goodnight... I'm leaving"
The pace of this opening track encouraged me to work with really jerky movements at a speed in time with the song. I didn't have a clue where I was going. I formed the main red, black and blue parts of the picture first (save for the bottom blue band, which was added last and unfortunately ruined it a little as I picked up the wrong shade pen), and then added the sketchy, scratchy birds. This was just purely following the sonic atmosphere, the increasingly frenetic and stormy sound, with the lighter touches of glockenspiel punctuating it (the birds, perhaps?)

Conductor "Far too orchestrated/far too calculated"
My next effort came from a different approach, and one that was in this case very unsuccessful. As you can see above, it's very bland and doesn't really show much of the song. The lyrical references to electricity steered me towards pylons, but this really didn't work. It would have been better if I could have thought less in concept, and more in the gently treated slowed-down fairground aesthetics of the song.

This is My House, This is My Home "Oh no, you found me..."
Quiet Little Voices "I'm young again!"A happy medium between the two methods of my previous drawings. The dashed black middle and red 'lines' came from the former song, just working with what it felt like, and the "quiet little monsters" line in the latter song inspired those grey, red-eyed, hopefully monster-like scribbles.

Short Bursts "You looked at me/my blood went cold"
Here I took the blood referenced in the lyrics as a starting point and measuredly with the pace of the rhythm section started drawing veins, roughly guided by looking at my wrists, then taking it further after I ran out of lines to recreate and next moving onto an imagined network of arteries. The black lines are nothing in particular, maybe some thing of life giving necessity less tangible than blood... no? Ok, I thought that sounded a bit too much of a stretch...

All tracks that inspired these visual monstrosities can be streamed here

This experiment would probably yield better results is tackled by a more avid artist than myself, I hope maybe someone reading will try it for themselves if they haven't before (I'm sure many have though, this can't be an original idea). It can certainly be a very fun way to occupy your hands and eyes when you're listening to something but want to be doing a little more without being distracted from the music so much. If anything, this can help you be more engaged with the music as you're processing it in different ways to make the drawings

All pictures drawn on plain white A5 paper (or sections of) using black and red Rotring Rollerpoint EF ink pens (sadly discontinued many years back) and Staedler Triplus Fineliners. Please note: some adjustments made to image contrast/brightness to compensate for my scanner being awful.

Watch out, I might be making this a semi-regular feature, who knows...

-Navigator