Influence of Musical Acoustics on Graphic Design: An Exploration with Indian Classical Music Album Cover Design

Graphic designers often look for new strategies to create interesting and innovative designs for book cover, music album cover, advertisement, etc. In the case of Indian classical instrumental music, while designing the music album covers, graphic designers till date have mostly used iconic representations such as photographs or paintings of the concerned vocalist/instrument players or the specific music instrument(s). Sometimes, we have also noticed Indian ragamala paintings from famous Indian miniatures, ornamental designs with ornamental typography, and nature photography on the album covers. These approaches of music album cover design are very common and, to a great extent, conventional. In order to explore new pathways and ideas for designing music album covers, we conducted an experiment with a group of 30 design students, where two preselected instrumental (sitar) Indian classical music clips of contrasting emotions (slow-tempo sad/calm music vs. fast-tempo joyful/exciting music) were played at a gap of 1 hour and the designers were asked to create a suitable album cover for each of the music pieces as they listened to each continuous in a loop. We used semiotic analysis and fractal analysis (Detrended Fluctuation Analysis) of the chosen music pieces as well as the corresponding cover designs made by the designers to explore the impact of different musical acoustical features on the graphic designs of the music album covers and the nature of intermediality between these two mediums. Findings revealed that while the designers represented their musical experiences through the album covers, they mostly depicted the album covers in three different ways, namely, (1) the designers directly represented the moods and emotions of the music clips in their album cover designs. In this case, the designers dominantly used symbolic representation followed by indexical representation. (2) Some of the designers represented the visual imageries, which were evoked by the music clips. This type of album covers have dominant pattern of indexical representation followed by iconic representation. (3) Some designers represented the musical features in their album cover designs. This type of album covers mostly comes under iconic representation. A comparative quantitative study on the symmetry scaling behavior (using fractal analysis) of the acoustical waveforms of the two music clips as well as the designers’ created images also indicated that there was a clear correspondence between musical acoustical features and the depicted visual features in the album cover designs. Moreover, the findings of this study provided us a new innovative approach for creating music album cover design beyond the conventional approaches.