I wanted to explore the conundrum that is Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon. The album itself is a masterpiece and I have always loved Pink Floyd’s music (brought up listening to them by my dad) and have been listening to them for all 21 years of my life. Despite this, I still am uncovering new things in the album and other albums that I never thought of before. These things can be anything from new notes that I never noticed before or diving deeper into the meanings behind words and sounds on the album. I am still finding new things and I believe that I will continue to do so for a long while still. To make this easier to do in the timeframe that I have, I chose to stick with the first two (although it is really just one) songs off of the album: Speak to Me and Breathe. Speak to Me is a short song, about ~40 seconds, that opens the album with a single heartbeat fading into existence. It goes on to sets up the thematic score for the rest of the album including the Doppler effect/helicopter from On the Run, the ticking clocks of Time, Clare Torry’s wailing vocals from The Great Gig in the Sky, the cash register and change from Money, and the mad man’s laugh from Brain Damage. I wanted to include these motifs too if time permitted. I wanted to represent the heartbeat as it’s something that ties us all together when we are all thrust into this world. The album is a dedication to the stresses, struggles, sorrows, joys, and pleasures of life. The words make you think while the music takes you to another place entirely (I’m not talking about the psychedelic sense although that is often closely tied to Pink Floyd, I personally steer clear). I am always trying to figure out the meanings behind the words. I wanted to represent the heartbeat, lips to create the idea of ‘speak to me’, which is followed closely by breath both physically and in the album. The surfer on top of the curl of one of the breaths is a reference to the line “Long you live, and high you fly/But only if you ride the tide/Balanced on the biggest wave/You race towards an early grave” an allusion to how one can achieve the greatest things if you put yourself out there, but it comes with a warning because in those highest highs, there’s the chance that you will burn out, crash down and it can lead to your early death. I then wanted to follow up this imagery with the combination of the iconic album art (the prism scattering light) combined with a moon that actually has a shrouded ‘dark side’. The question I am focusing on is ‘what does the dark side of the moon mean/represent in these two songs.’