“For my first project I used flame and its aspects of creation and destruction to make a video. For my second project I used flame to paint and create photographs. For my final project I have chosen to use flame to create music.
I have done so by converting the word “flame” itself into chords to be played on a guitar. Guitar chords range from the letters A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. “Flame” obviously has letters outside of this constraint, so I came up with a numeric solution for this. I assigned each letter of the alphabet a number 1-7 respectively and repetitively, representing the 7 chords. I then converted the unusable letters into playable chords via this number/letter pairing system. This is a bit hard to explain, so I have included a picture of my thought process below:
The chord progression I came up with was FEAFE. I then chose to place my capo (a clamp fastened across all the strings of a guitar to change the key) on the 5th fret in resemblance of the five letters that form the word “flame.”
My next step was to find a way to make these chords sound more interesting, meaningful, and cohesive. I researched the different ways to play each chord and played variations until I found something I liked. The resulting chords progression is as follows: Fmaj7-Em7-Am-Fmaj-Emaj
Finally, I developed a strumming pattern and added a melody on top of these chords. I recorded the final results using garage band on my phone.
I added the song to a video of a candle flame to complete the project: