MUSE - Experience. Music. Perception.
Proposed Experimental Exhibition, Self-Initiated Project, 2020
Muse is an experimental design project studying the musical perception of the human through three installation experiences. People are encouraged to interact with the installations and explore the music visually with their own perception. We try to understand how people understand music here.
The name ‘Muse’ is taken from the inspiration of Greek mythology. The Greek goddesses of art & music are the Muses. They are known as one entity, though there are actually 9 of them and each is unique in their own way. Its resonances with the concept of perception as perception could be understood universally to some extent, though still unique among each of us.
With the idea above, the visual language of the exhibition should also follow the vagueness of musical perception. Therefore, it was designed in a fluid and flexible approach.
How do we perceive music?
According to the research behind how humans universally perceive music:
the time of music, the space occupied by music, and the flow of music.
1 - The Senses (Pure Cognitive Experience)
This experience encourages visitors to entirely trust their own guts and follow their instinct while listening to the music, leaving a great space for visitors to create freely without any guidelines restricting them.
The body-interactive experience includes a large surrounding fabric coated with Thermo-reactive ink that could instantly react with the human body. Visitors touch and create colour images on the fabric. As the temperature cooled down, the colour fades away, as so does music which constantly appears and fade.
2 - The Shades (Perception display installation)
This installation is re-inventing how the 9 sampled participants perceived the same extract of the music. Their simple doodles are expected to be transformed into a certain type of graphic display.
3 - The Table (Visual language of musical perception)
The last installation is a translation between musical perception and visual language which aims to understand how perception works when music meets our mind. The aim of this table is to provide a visual way or a visual language for people to use to convey perceptions of music that our verbal language could not.
