Spectrogram Art

An original piece of music that's designed to look like a dragon when viewed in a spectrogram (a picture of sound). I call it Spectro Dragon. 

You may have seen that video I posted recently where I open my MIDI art in a spectrogram. I thought it looked pretty cool, and since then I've been wanting to create a piece of music that's specifically designed to be a spectrogram drawing. After a few days of work, these are the results! 

The creation process was similar to MIDI art (I actually first composed it as a MIDI art piece), with a few key differences: 

1. Since this is a visual representation of SOUND (and not just MIDI data) I didn't have to limit myself to a keyboard and I could use my voice (whistling, singing) and as many different sound layers as I wanted for the arrangement. All sounds here are performed either with my voice, keyboards or Therevox. 

2. In a MIDI piano roll, all you see is the separate note blocks, but in a Spectrogram you can see pitch bends so I tried to utilize vibrato and portamento to create curved details in the dragon.

3. The types of sounds I used were very important - they had to be fairly dark, with few harmonics (especially on the low end) because brighter sounds have many more harmonics that show up in the spectrogram and obscure the drawing. The biggest challenge here was finding sounds that worked (without limiting myself only to boring sine waves). 

BTW, I know some artists have hidden images in their music before using tools that convert photos to frequencies, but those just sound like random noises and I wanted this to sound like music. In other words, I couldn't rely on any "tools" and I created this from scratch (just like my MIDI art) using my experience in composition, counterpoint and music theory - as well as a healthy dose of trial and error to get the desired shapes. :)