Check out what some great compositions look like in pictures

Designer Nicholas Rougeux draws inspiration for his artistic creations from many sources, including Shakespeare’s sonnets, freeway interchanges and notes from musical scores.

Four Seasons
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Spring. Image credit: Nicholas Rougeux

Rougeux acknowledges that he can’t read music, but his goal with the Off the Staff project was to produce something that would appeal to classical music fans. “I wanted to find a way to represent an entire musical score in a single image—not necessarily as an infographic but something fans of the music would enjoy having on their wall because they’re familiar with the music,” he wrote on his website.

As well as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Rougeux has also created works based on compositions by Händel, Mozart and Beethoven, among others.

His design involves taking a musical score and removing all musical markings apart from the notes. The notes were then assigned circles based on the duration of the note: the larger the circle, the longer the note.

A note’s distance from the centre of the circle design used by Rougeux indicates its pitch, with the circles closer to the centre representing lower notes and those further away denoting a higher pitch.

Rougeux sells prints of his creations on his website and you can get them in black and white as well as colour.

 

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