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Arts & Communication On the interplay between painting and music

content and provide a layered conceptual model that case of a music album’s visual cover, to more indirect or
can serve as a communication and analytical tool within even personal relations, such as the favorite painting of a
multidisciplinary content creation teams, and (2) we report music performer – an example mentioned by one of the
promising preliminary results from a qualitative user study group members during the discussion. The participants’
with a mobile application, suggesting that the proposed input was gathered in a shared document for a period
spectrum of semantic relations between visual artworks of 2 weeks, so all the group members had access to the
and music songs may provide useful “bridges” between the content contributed so far. This procedure resulted in the
two media, reflecting the long-standing dialog between the collection of about 50 concrete examples, which depicted
two artistic communities in an appealing and concise way. a variety of relations between works of art and music and
served as a preliminary data corpus for the purposes of our
2. Data and methods analysis.
We followed an explorative research methodology that Following a bottom-up methodological approach, we
involves three main steps: studied the pool of reported examples and, being informed
(1) First, we organized a multidisciplinary focus group and inspired by existing comparative art theories, we
1,2
to collect a series of use cases that reflect varying collaboratively created a conceptual model that systematically
relation types between the two forms of art. Then, captures a variety of potential interconnections between
we constructed a graph-based conceptual model to visual artworks and music pieces, ranging from direct
reflect the main entities involved, along with a range one-to-one relationships between them to more indirect
of potential relationships between them interconnections among their creators and content.
(2) We defined a story structure that communicates
the direct or indirect relations between the two 2.2. Experience shaping to communicate
works of art, by starting from the visual artwork and multifaceted connections
traversing the graph toward its musical counterpart. The next issue we tackled relates to the communication of the
We accordingly shaped a set of 10 stories and entered identified relations to the broader public. Each connection
them into a mobile app that supports the display of involves at least four different entities, namely the visual
digital images and narrative sequences, along with artwork, the music song, and their respective creators.
audio player functionality
(3) Finally, we performed a qualitative user study with Considering that the recipient of the information will most
likely not be aware of all the related entities, we devised a
15 participants and investigated their perception and “three-act” story scheme that includes the following main
interest over the provided cultural content and its parts: (1) one (or more) narrative about the visual artwork or/
narrative structure.
and its creator, (2) one (or more) describing the connection,
We describe each one of the aforementioned processes and (3) one about the music or/and its creator or performer.
in detail, explaining how the outcomes of each step guided
the following actions. To investigate the communicative effects of the adopted
approach, we accordingly created a set of stories about
2.1. Identification of different connection types 10 pairs of artworks (with each pair including a painting
image and a music song) and performed a user study
We organized a multidisciplinary focus group with with 15 participants. The content created was entered into
participants who have expertise in several different fields, ArtStory Beats, a mobile application that simultaneously
including visual artists, musicians, a museum learning provides audio-to-visual and narrative content. When
program designer, and art communication specialists, the users point their device over a (physical or digital
as well as digital cultural experience designers and an representation of a) visual artwork, the reproduction of the
information technology expert. The group was first related audio file initiates, and a narrative flow is displayed
gathered and, after discussing the long-lasting relationship over the mobile’s screen (Figure 1).
between visual artists and musicians, its members were
asked to report a few examples that showcase any form of Aiming to explore the participants’ responses over the
the relation between two concrete works of art, a painting, different relation types identified, we included stories from
and a music song, providing a digital presentation of the all six levels, while giving more emphasis on the personal
artwork along with an audio file, as well as a short text level, since we posit that it is quite underexplored, and
explaining their connection. No constraint was set to that less on the morphological level, which is quite studied by
end; the group members were free to choose any type of art theorists, and it is more likely to be suited for people
artwork and were prompted to consider different types of that already have an essential understanding of art or/and
relations, from close and direct connections, such as in the music forms.

Volume 2 Issue 4 (2024) 3 doi: 10.36922/ac.2367