The Phantom Of The WAP-ra Eye Music Visualization piece came about as an amalgamation of a few of my ideas. First and foremost, I saw a lot of potential in a combination of musical genres that are underutilized. It is not very often that I hear rap music stitched together with classical music. I really enjoyed the aesthetics of seeing music and musical notation written out on paper as sheet music. I had a few songs I wanted to mash together, but I landed on a premade mash up titled Phantom of the Wapra which is a mash-up of WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion and The Overture of Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd-Webber . I really felt that the classical nature had a very nice look so I started with thinking about animating musical notes. Because rap is just another form of music I thought It would be easy to combine the two in a form only distinguishable visually by people who could read music. I then opted to look past my visual appeal and looks to what would be more interesting for others. I landed on "eye music". The idea seemed simple enough. Just writing sheet music in a shape. I chose the most common shape I had seen when researching eye music: rings/circles. I then had the solve the issue of motion. I looked back at my "Musica Viva" project and thought that the ring and shapes around could resemble the vinyl I used for that project. The last thing I wanted to implement with this piece was something revolving around linguistics, so I decided to use the vowel symbols. Using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) I attempted to denote the sounds of both Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion as they spoke. At the end I wanted to create a mandala-esque visualization that got more abstract the further from the center you got. The resulting product is the video you see above.
For the main eye music ring I used the Overture of Phantom of the Opera. I only used the sheet music for the pipe organ. Because the Phantom of the Wapra mashup uses slightly different notes I altered this music to match the mashup rather than the original score.
The only sheet music I used for the lyrics of WAP is a piano adaptation for the song.
My first version of this piece followed my moodboard to a t with each vowel/consonant sound displayed as they are said, I found that this was much more interesting visually and added to the the abstraction I was looking for.
As I found the first version was too hard to read and process I opted for a version that spelled out the words fully using the vowel/consonant sounds so viewers can read and process the words as they appear.