In the “See the Music” program at Somerset County Senior Wellness Center we learned something about the similarities between art and music by comparing design elements. We talked about some artists who looked at art differently than their predecessors and we reviewed some images of famous artwork, discussing how they exemplified certain design characteristics.
We learned about synesthesia, the condition that some people have that “crosswires” their sensory input, and we looked at some famous synesthetes, like Duke Ellington and Vincent VanGogh. We looked at design elements that are common to both music and art. Specifically we talked about rhythm, line, space, color, harmony, texture and form.
We experimented with some rhythms ourselves… and we made a piece of music!
To start our musical piece we picked a motif line based on 3 notes in the key of C. Including C, we had F, the 4th degree of the scale and B, the 7th degree of the scale
We added some space to make the line more interesting, making the first and second notes shorter and the third note longer.
Out of the four choices the group had – energetic red, peaceful green, happy yellow or blue for the blues- We chose a “happy” color for our music, which dictated the speed and style of the piece.
We added some harmony, creating chords from our root notes. In this case we used C Maj. 7, F M and Bm7b5
For texture we added a melodic line over the chord changes, and for form we used a simple A/B pattern. Our A pattern was the three chords, CM7, FM and Bm7b5. while the B part was simply the C major chord.