Eli Campbell Art & Design

This piece was created during my undergraduate studies in Digital Design and Fabrication at SUNY New Paltz. The assignment involved creating a talisman which would be 3D-printed. This was around the time I began to seriously pursue the idea of computer-aided design as my profession, a change following my original plan to study jazz guitar performance in college, not to mention my second plan to study photography. Above is a rendering from Rhino, below is one of the prints from Shapeways.

The symbols on the talisman represent musical notes, each symbol being a tone from the chromatic scale, and the separate rows of symbols representing strings, in my case, the strings of a guitar, separated by the interval of the Perfect Fourth. The visual language of the symbols was inspired by dots on dice.The number of dots represents the scale degrees of the diatonic scale, with lines connecting the dots to make visually distinct shapes. In the 3D model, diatonic notes (white keys in the Key of C on piano, for instance) are embossed on square bases, while non-diatonic notes (black keys in C) are engraved in circular bases.

I have been fascinated with music for my entire life. At Carmel High School, I studied Music Theory with the amazing Mr. Ballantoni. He helped me understand music on a technical level that allowed me to unlock a new level of musicality in my playing and performance. I became fascinated with Arnold Schoenberg’s Twelve Tone music. Representing musical tones numerically rather than with the familiar solfege and letters opened up a new understanding for me, and soon graph paper notebooks began filling with my own music theory ideas. I converted the 12 chromatic notes into numbers, and wrote code in my graphing calculator to create sequences of notes and intervals. Later, I designed these symbols during this Talisman design project to replace the numbers.