Hi. I'm a graphic design student working on my final senior degree project involving the mapping of musical structure in the Beatles through a series of musicology-related information graphics printed in poster and book form.
I would love this to be a fairly collaborative project, so I'm looking for as much input as possible. If you're unfamiliar with information graphics, here are some slick examples:
Masterfully re-interpreted subway maps:
http://zeroperzero.com/2008/crc.htmlSomebody's relationship map:
http://dizzia.deviantart.com/art/DIZZIA-Gregory-M-PDF-59770086The work of Josef Muller-Brockmann:
http://www.quentindelobel.com/index.php?/cartographie-josef-mueller-brockmann/The ebb and flow of blockbuster movie revenues:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.htmlJack Kerouac's "On The Road," mapped by sentence length and subject matter:
http://www.notcot.com/images/2008/04/Sentence-Drawings-Poster.jpgzoo populations:
http://simplecomplexity.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/animals-in-the-house.jpgmuch more if you're interested:
http://vi.sualize.us/search/all/infographics/As you can see, infographics aren't just boring numbers, and they can be elegant and colorful visual solutions to presenting data.
I have some ideas for different musical/Beatles factors to map, ranging in focus from song-specific harmonic analyses to discography-spanning comparisons. I'm trying to develop a system to represent songs in a linear timeline graphic, with the possibility of charting just about anything that can be measured in a song over time. For example, chords expressed with tonic color-coding, along with marks representing a song's meter, demarkations of the song's sections (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, etc), accompanying color-coded lines representing the toggling on/off of the vocals of each band member.
I would love to hear what people think would be good variables that could be reasonably measured. I'm somewhat versed in music theory, but plenty of you will know more than I. The best means of gathering some of this info I can think of is to use sheet music and fake books, with some extra guidance from Alan Pollack's "Notes On..." series. If anybody has any suggestions for the best Beatles musicology books, let me konw.
I would love to flesh out some career-spanning variables, which could be mapped onto a big poster or fold-out section in a book, that would provide some indication of the evolution in their musical structure. It would be great to look at different sections of this graphic timeline, with album release dates and other events labeled, and be able to observe subtle shifts in the patterns of the data as a result of their progression. Perhaps certain visual elements would actually appear more orderly earlier on and start to melt into even less predictable patterns in their later recordings. Any ideas??
These visuals DO NOT have to be time-based like the examples I've given. I was hoping to find something indicating their evolution, but there might be plenty of other factors to examine and illustrate. Again, I am very open. For the book, I'd love to include pages with graphs of random (and perhaps pointless) Beatles facts, statistics, maps, etc.
I'm very excited about this. I'd love to sent out the final screen-printed posters to those who help, so let me know what you think about possible factors to measure.