Music and Moods
Impact and Empathy Project Process
Looking through hyperakt.com for something meaningful for our Impact and Empathy project, we found many projects related to mental health. These projects would be in either the form of awareness or help. As we kept seeing either awareness or help—or both—being a part of the projects, we began to consider our own experiences with mental health and resources we’ve either worked with or interacted with.
After talking it out, we finally came upon the decision of helping people, not just raising awareness. There is so much mental health awareness nowadays that we felt it was almost oversaturated and not very helpful, just a reminder of issues one may be going through.
One way we had all dealt with our own mental health was with music. That’s where the idea for Music and Moods began.
Crystal
Going into this project, I thought that having an overall group theme and individual deliverables would be a great idea because it would allow us to explore our separate interests and interpret that theme in multiple different ways. Because our project data included various songs, emotions, colors, and interpretations of music, I decided to go with a version of package design. Likewise, as I am applying to grad school this semester, I wanted to explore the many types of design that I could possibly study, and package design is one of them.
Originally, I was going to make vinyl sleeves based on each song, but as soon as I got feedback that it would be interesting to incorporate an actual vinyl or CD into my work, I changed the idea to CD sleeves instead. So there, my idea was born: I was going to repackage 25 songs based on how they feel, using the colors and shapes that people associated with those songs. I had no control over the initial shapes or colors, and was only allowed to turn the color suggestion into a 3-color palette and create a pattern out of those shapes.
On one side, I designed a pattern to cover most of the CD sleeve. On the other side, that pattern was a background to our logo for Music n Moods, a “Did you know?” fact regarding music and our emotions/mental health, and a spotify code linked to the song the pattern represents. I thoroughly enjoyed this project and was particularly excited to figure out how I wanted people to interact with my work. I decided not to disclose the song anywhere because if this were an actual distributable project, I would want people to ask themselves, “Oh, I wonder what this array of shapes and colors represent…” and then use the spotify code to answer that for themselves. My hope is that it would turn into an internal dialogue of whether or not they resonate with the song representation or not. Of course, though, because I have footnotes and every song correlates with one emotion (happy, sad, angry, calm, or energetic), I also included a key so that all of that information is accessible. And don’t worry, I didn’t include the songs too, duh!
The process of making these CD sleeves was not that bad. I switched templates a couple times but eventually found a simple one that I could recreate very easily. The template was for a sleeve, so it had a front and a back panel and two flaps to glue/tape them together. I printed them all on cardstock silver paper, so they were durable, but admittedly hard to fold without too much creasing. The silver finish did pair with the metallic side of the CDs really well, though. I also borrowed Krysten’s computer (thanks, Krysten!) which allowed me to easily print each pattern onto a CD. Although downloading the proper printer files took about an hour, printing each CD took 2 minutes or less. Overall it was a very easy process, and I am excited to see what I will print next with the 30 CDs I have left over. 😅
Each CD sleeve is about 4.5x4.5 in. and the CDs are about the same size. At 5 songs per emotion, that brings this collection to 25 CD sleeves and matching CDs. Although this project was definitely a learning experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the end result.
Dennis
Dennis’ process is featured on a medium post related to the OSU! game development! It is a very interesting read, and has all of our final game outcomes near the bottom!
Emily
My contribution to this project was a physical book of the data we collected. I used the data from a form I created that I passed out to the class, which was one of three means of data collection used in our project. Each page of my book has the name of the song, and the color and shape associated with that song. In the center of the page is a large interpretation of the shapes submitted and the background of each page is the color submitted. I also included the album covers from each song to see how the associated colors relate to the album cover- many of the colors and covers matchup.
I knew I wanted to do a book for this project because it was a good way of visualizing the data without doing a poster, which I thought would be too straightforward. Originally, we all planned to make a poster to go along with our deliverables, but we decided to scrap that idea. One of the other idea we had was to use a mid-century modern or retro aesthetic, but that ended up not working out as I was making the book.
Max
Research and Sketches
My initial sketches were ways of expressing music in 5 different emotions. Not all of them are amazing, but I think the ones where I used and manipulated photography were the most eye catching. Those images really stuck in the back of my head when I was designing. I wanted the animations to invoke the feelings that the faces were making.
Music is such a powerful tool to combat mental illness. I believe its strength comes from its ability to help people express their own emotions. It can be hard to grapple with emotions, and sometimes you don’t know how to express something you are feeling. A certain tune or melody can help alleviate feelings or make them sharper and apparent.
Our group approached this project in three different directions, a book, a collection of CD’s and a game called OSU!. One thing we knew was the 5 emotions we wanted to represent: Sad, Angry, Calm, Happy, and Energetic.
All of the shapes and colors we used were collected through different means. The data for Crystal’s albums was found using a Google Form, Emily’s Book was influenced by a class form that was handed out. The shapes and themes for Dennis and my game were taken from interactive posters that we hung up around 808 Commonwealth and the CFA at 855 Commonwealth. (Our colors were influenced by Crystal and Emily’s data, because we only had black sharpies tied to our posters.
Many people interacted with the posters. It was cool to leave them hanging up and a couple days later they would be filled with drawing and words. One poster had to be taken down due to profane images being drawn on it, but with CFA being full of expressive art freshman, I was expecting some explicit drawings.
This medium post will go over part of the game. Specifically, the backgrounds of the OSU! Game.
The idea of using the OSU game came from Dennis, who uses the game to relax and rewind. When watching people who are are actually good at the game (like Dennis), it is very satisfying and I can understand why people like it, but I am not one of those people, I think I would get stressed out.
Everything in OSU! is customizable, so we decided to use sourced shapes for icons. There were two shapes we need, the cursors and the little circles where the beats would be. We came up with 10 different icons!
The Chestnut Cloud was used on my end for the animation, which is why it is not black and white. Dennis used all the other icons in the final OSU! games.
Final Videos
Another thing we sourced from Crystal and Emily were songs. On each of their forms, people wrote down songs that they listened too with each emotion.
The first video I made was our energetic video. The original plan was for Dennis and me to mix all the playlists together of all the songs we sourced into categories and animate based upon the songs. We only did that for these first two mixes, the Energetic and Angry ones. The last three are all single songs.
Energetic Mix:
This mix was the first one I made, and I think I spent 15 or so hours on it and with multiple different drafts. I think on the second draft or so I realized it wasn’t feasible for me and Dennis to do a mix for every emotion. It was much more notes for Dennis, and more transitions between songs for me.
Angry Mix:
The Angry mix was the last one I did, and it was the mix we played in class. In all honesty, it is my least favorite. I used basic After Effect Transitions and didn’t seamlessly blend the songs and animations together like in the energetic mix. I still think the color palette is really good! (Shout out to Laura for the Silver suggestion). Also this video took 4 hours to export, so I was not willing to do another draft after the first one.
Calm:
I think the Calm video used the colors and shapes most effectively. We sourced “Sand” and “Chestnut” for the colors, and recurring sourced shape that we felt best fit “calm” were the clouds. The sphere effect I added later after playing around with the Sphere Effect, it made the clouds feel lighter and added some dimension to the video.
Happy / Uplifting:
For these 3 videos— calm, happy, and sad. I was focused on making the videos background videos and not stand alone videos. The icons we chose for happy were also smiley faces, so I thought circles were an appropriate background.
Sad:
This one was my favorite. I sketched up the background in Procreate and tried to animate rain right in the app. Total flop. It looked so bad and it was painstaking. I threw the image into After Effects and found a rain effect. I used that to make basic rainfall, then I used a particle simulator to create the rain that bounces off the railings. Lastly, I used CC Mercury (an effect I used to make a lava lamp effect on another project) to create rain drops that hit the camera! So cool when everything came together. I learned how to do all this from Youtube, but piecing the different styles together made such a cool video. The song (Whoa by xxxTENTACION), paired so well with it! This got me so excited when it came together, and it’s a background piece that has its own presence. A perfect middle ground. I AM SO HAPPY WITH THIS VIDEO.
There is one thing I would change, I couldn’t figure out how to do this, but I wanted to make the raindrops more cartoonish, like maybe color blocks or something, but whatever I tried just looked flat or weird.
Class Presentation
I the final presentation of our work was not the best. Our initial idea for the videos was for people to walk into a dark room or closed off area and really immerse themselves in the game. I attempted to do that with some shirts over our screens that people could poke their heads into. Not an amazing idea honestly. I would not have an issue putting my head into a random shirt, but I think only James tried it (thank you!).
In hindsight, maybe I should have said the shirts were clean or something. I thought people would assume they were.
GOOD THING WE ALSO PROJECTED IT. I think that was a hit. If I could re-do anything about the projector it would be that we played shorter segments of each game, then we could experience more emotions and show off more of the work me and Dennis did. I think we both put a lot of effort into these videos and only some one of them was shown. Next time though!
Very fun but tiring project. Here is some feedback we got: Connect the projects together a bit more— one way to do this would be to flip through Emily’s book to the beat of one of the songs (Lauren), or we could burn one of Crystal’s CD’s with a video that me and Dennis made.
I think one of the weakness of our project is that while we all had the same research process. We all interpret it differently. While this makes sense due to how everyone interprets emotions and feelings differently, as a final project our work seemed a bit disjointed.