For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of encoding sound, specifically music, into a visual medium. Before MP3s music was hoarded, loaned, shared, kept in pristine collections, or kicked around on the floors of cars. And even when it was beaten, battered and used to the point of destruction, the artifact was never a disposable commodity. The idea of having a physical medium that has a life outside the songs themselves appeals to me. When everything can be downloaded for free, it’s hard to give anything personal value. If I tell you something is great, it’s just never the same as putting it in your hands. My initial idea was to encode a digital music file as a high density bar code. Not the ugly black and white ones, but something like those crazy colored Microsoft tags with all the magical geometry. I quickly realized however, that even a low bit rate MP3 contains enough ones and zeros that the bar code would have to be big, really big. Too big to be slapped in your friend’s hand like mixtape. What’s worse, translating a ginormous bar code back into music would be a chore. So being the great design thinker that I am, I gave up. It never occurred to me to make the project into a book, which is what Irene Themann did. For her Colour Rhapsody project, she created a book of audio and optical experiments. Themann used Ascii encoding instead of bar codes, which resulted in some very cool minimalist artwork.
