Pink Floyd, James Brown, Prince, and Miles Davis. All legendary artists with incredibly different sounds; there’s little chance you’ll confuse ‘On the Run’ by Pink Floyd with Davis’s ‘Bitches Brew’- the sounds are just too different. But what about ‘visualizing’ the music? What do these famous songs look like?

German artist Martin Klimas explores the question ‘What Does Music Look Like?’ in his latest photographic series. To capture the ‘look’ of music, Klimas first covers a speaker with a sheet of translucent plastic. He then pours brightly colored paints on the sheet and cranks up the volume, snapping thousands of images in a second to capture the exploding, dancing ‘visuals’ of the song. And just as the songs of Pink Floyd and Miles Davis sound nothing alike, their visual counterparts couldn’t look more opposite.

Miles Davis- Bitches Brew

Davis’ smooth jazz, pictured above, translates to bouncing, slow, steady drops of neon color while the more frantic sound of Pink Floyd, pictured below, create a crazed, frenetic canvas.

Pink Floyd- On The Run

Click through more images from the visual experiment below, and visit Klimas’ site to see the complete series:

 Martin Klimas