Watch That Sound

 

With the visual score, it’s possible to paint a picture of your ideas about sounds, moods, atmosphere and music. It’s an aid to help you find and record the right sound and music.

You can print the visual score or make a PDF.

manual visual score

Symbols

The horizontal position of the symbols indicates time, vertical pitch, or sound intensity. Each symbol does not correspond to a particular sound. Instead, the score is a sketch, a visual trigger for the sounds you want to create.

Like notes on a sheet of music, each line, dot, shape, and colour has a personal meaning and symbolises what you want to record, and where to place it.

Colour

The colour drop-down menu is used to select a colour for each symbol. The menu can be found by clicking the arrow symbol close to the centre of the green menu bar. Once selected, all the symbols that you draw will be in that colour.

manual visual score colors

Drawing shapes

All shapes can be drawn using simple mouse movements:

Quick mouse click

This draws a small circle.

illu visuele partituur korte klik

Long mouse click

This draws a large circle. The longer you hold the mouse button, the bigger the circle grows. It’s like ink flowing out of a pen.

illu visuele partituur lange klik

Short mouse click and drag quickly

This action draws a circle with a tail. Depending which way you drag the mouse, the tail can be drawn to the left, to the right, upwards or downwards.

illu visuele partituur korte klik en snel slepen

Long click and drag

As soon as the circle begins to fill with ink, you can create a teardrop shape as you drag the mouse to the left or to the right.

illu visuele partituur lange klik en slepen

Long click-wait-drag-wait

If you don’t release the mouse, a tail will grow. Depending on how long you keep pressing the mouse, this will create either a thick straight line or a drop with a thick round tail.

illu visuele partituur lange klik wachten slepen wachten

The last symbol that you entered can always be removed by pressing the delete key on your keyboard. The other symbols can also be moved or deleted after you select them.

Creating symbols with your mouse is easier in practice than it seems in this text – try to see your mouse as a pen or airbrush.