Data-driven album cover series 2019-23

25 Mar

Beginning in 2019, this project saw the creation of a series of album covers for the Berlin-based record label Sum Over Histories. Each cover artwork began with a habitual listening phase – playing artists’ songs alongside daily activities. The most resonant track was selected and visualised using a central circle motif, inspired by architectural elements and celestial phenomena.

Each cover artwork was started with a list of songs by one artist. The process began with habitual listening, and playing the songs during daily activities like working, resting, and running. The most resonant track was then chosen as the album's ambassador. The next step was visualization, consistently featuring the circle as a central motif. The radial formation for each cover was inspired by architectural elements – such as stained glass, windows and domes – and celestial phenomena – like planets and galaxies. These visual prompts shaped the abstraction of the selected song’s waveform. The sound's anatomy, pre-visualised within a frequency graph, became optically tangible as a circular form.

In the final phase, the existing frequency marks were manipulated to reflect the emotional and intuitive vibrations evoked by the song. This converted the static waveform into fluid, sense-driven patterns. The visual markers pointed to sensations derived from the song, varying between spiky or sharp, blurred or wavy. Some emulated characteristics of flowers or jellyfish, reflecting the initial experience of consuming the song elementally.

Saint Is, Something in Common EP, 2019