Catching Up: AP Art and Design Foundations

I want to start this blog off with square one, a point at which I feel like I started to take things seriously design wise and with my "career". 

I had attended TN Governor's School for Visual Arts, and this was for sure a milestone for me. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure how I got in compared to the talent of those whom I met at the summer program. I was doing only digital-mixed media art at the time which felt like cheating compared to the work that my friends had done. But I got in. 

It was after that, around 2021-2022, in my senior year of high school, when I started AP Art and Design. I had felt inspired to complete something out of my comfort zone: a 3D audio-visual piece, a collection of sculptures that could take up an entire space. It was vague, and I didn't know how to explain it, but I knew exactly what I wanted to see. 

I got it done. I'll attach pictures below, and then write about it after. 

The idea that I had was to bridge the gap between my music production knowledge and my design knowledge to try and create a visualized musical piece that one could listen and see the music in a space as they walk throughout. 

- I created an instrumental and analyzed the frequencies it covered 

- I mapped the color spectrum to the frequency spectrum and analyzed where those colors would fit in a given space (see middle picture) 

- I created rules for the project; created "audio-visual" maps to be able to define any song in a space, studied live sound and acoustics to try and understand how I could capture these shapes I was hearing

- Studied synesthesia and people's general associations with music and color

- I played the instrumental on my laptop underneath the seat, and let the listener put on headphones to immerse themselves in the space

My execution of this project did not match the grand ideas I had in my head of what it would look like, but the ideas stand for themselves. When I entered college, I gave myself a 4-year goal of creating a live music event that mimicked this idea and built on it. This would take a few years of educational study in my audio classes, experiences playing my music live, and experiences in running events; all of which I hadn't had yet.