Macy Burr

I seek to explore how different hues, shapes, and substrates can accurately depict various elements of traditional music notation and speak to the world of visual thinkers. I plan to make a large-scale, dimensional soundscape using felt tiles to illustrate the musical notes in an excerpt of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. This piece demonstrates an iconic aural pattern that I want to translate into a format that can be digested visually. The studio space will greatly benefit the scale of the work I plan to create. It will span 6’ x 6’, which is much larger than anything I’ve attempted to make in my artistic career thus far. I will mount 672 felt tiles to a wooden frame representing every note within the first 42 measures of the melody. I plan to spend the first 2 weeks in the studio constructing the base frame. I’ll then color-code the song note by note based on my system of musical data visualization—adjusting the palette to resonate with the spirit of the song. The following 2-3 weeks will be spent on the fiber art—fabricating, measuring, aligning, and placing the physical pieces onto the frame. I’d like to add an audio component as well. When possible, a set of headphones with the corresponding music will be available to provide a multi-sensory experience for the viewer. My goal is for the resulting artwork to expand our understanding of relationships between aural and visual phenomena.

The Medium Artist Residencies
Spring 2024