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| A part of Stephan Thiel's Visual Music project. |
I recently sent an email to Stephan Thiel, creator of understanding-shakespeare.com as well as numerous other projects focusing on visualizing literature, music, and other arts. I discussed in a previous post my fascination with the Understanding Shakespeare project and created some visuals of my own in my analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In an effort to understand more of Thiel's thoughts on the concept of visualizing the arts, I included the following questions in my email:
I look forward to his response. This type of study of literature and music is very interesting to me and I am excited to see what Thiel's thoughts are on its uses and power as a tool for understanding.What do you see as the specific benefits of such visualization? In what ways does this sort of thing provide a new understanding of the music or literature being visualized?
Do you think that visualization can influence one's subjective interpretation of the piece, or do you think that it is more of an analysis of the objective patterns and structure measured in the piece (such as notes and rhythms in MIDI files, or frequency of terms and phrases in Shakespeare)? What are the benefits of analyzing the objective data versus subjective interpretation of a piece of art?
Also, in what way do you picture this sort of visualization as engaging the public mind? Do you think of it more as a way to experience the works that are being visualized or more as a way for interested individuals to analyze and better understand the work?
I had planned to teach my little sister Brianna (7) about A Midsummer Night's Dream this weekend. I wasn't able to arrange a time to talk to her as I had hoped as she lives with my family out of state, but I should be able to do so this evening. She is young, but she is a witty girl. Recently, my younger brother, who is a freshman in high school, was telling my family about a couple of boys in his choir class who got into an argument over some silly, trivial thing to do with the music they were working on. Brianna, who was listening to my brother tell this story, suggested that he should have turned to them and said, "Ladies, you're both beautiful; now stop fighting." For some reason, I think she might appreciate Shakespeare. We will see how this goes.
This looks interesting. What do you think that the benefits of visualizing Shakespeare are? Is it to appeal to more visual learners, or is there a way that all can benefit from these kinds of interpretations? I hope to see what his response is on your post.
ReplyDeleteHuh. I looked at Thiel's pictures online and personally found them to be more confusing than helpful. It seemed like a ton of statistics to me. Maybe I just don't see the patterns... I think your personal images made a lot more sense.
ReplyDeleteIt's true, the visuals I made are certainly more approachable. I guess it just depends on how you like to think about the play. I think it is interesting being able to see the whole play at once, mapped out before me. It is interesting to see the different patterns that show up and the different thoughts you can have about the play when looking at it from a different perspective. Which images did you look at of Thiel's, Angela? There were several different "approaches" that he had displayed. Which did you look at? Or were they all confusing?
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