Remember when an album used to be a tangible object, its cover art an integral part of its aesthetic? Probably not. Today we only read and dream about it, and re-read the passage from Just Kids in which Patti Smith describes arranging Bob Dylan's albums on her mantle like they were paintings.While music may never again be worshipable in quite the same way, artists are constantly trying to use technology to reclaim its aesthetic value, physically speaking. Seeing music in the mp3 era may have begun with the screensaver animations of WinAmp and iTunes, but some artists are taking the visualization thing to new levels. All-stars in this category include Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares, whose songs, when put through software that visualizes sound waves, miraculously create images (a devil face and some cats, respectively). Also notable is Jared Raab's music video for Born Ruffians' “What to Say”, created, painstakingly, with a process that turns video images into sound waves that, when played through an oscilloscope, look like images.The newest iteration, from artist Frans Masereel Centrum and Belgian creative studio Indianen, is also mind-bendingly recursive and brilliant. Their project Evil Eye is a screen printed record. But the designs don't just serve an aesthetic purpose: They are the music itself. Specifically, they are representations of the exact waveforms of the music; when read by a laser, to amplify the music within."There's no conversion between the printed patterns and the sounds they make, it's truly one-to-one," Indianen told FastCoDesign. "We didn't want to make prints that need some extra information to become sound, like for example a visual midi-track. We really wanted to have all the sound inside the prints."The record has eight tracks, each running in a 1.3-second rotational loop. While these songs may not enter your heavy rotation, some of them do actually sound kind of cool, and could probably slide nicely into an indie sci-fi flick. They could make for a good prop too.
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