Music & Memory
project Type: Post Graduate Project
MA Graphic Communication Design
at Central Saint Martins
Completed: Spring 2020
Interested in exploring how music and lyrics can act as a collective memory, I asked a group of 22 - 35 year olds to annotate a number of songs that encapsulated the 2000s indie music scene. I posed various questions about associations, emotions, physical responses, and specific memories.
While their emotions and memories were their own, various themes emerged throughout the responses as well as an underlying sense of nostalgia. In thinking about how a collective memory could be visualized further, I played with compiling all of the answers without the context of the lyrics and overprinting them illegibly. These visualizations were then turned into a poster series.
Song annotations
Compilation posters
Arctic Monkeys Collective Memory
In another iteration of visualizing collective memory, I designed a website with every Arctic Monkeys lyric. Lines are then annotated with listener’s memories, rather than the meaning of the lyrics. The site’s development is currently in progress.
