The foundations of my collage primarily surrounded the interrelationship between Chopin’s Waltz Op. 64 No.2 with the 1978 comic strip series “Lemme out of here!”. This is accompanied by a magazine from 1994 detailing renowned pianist Arthur Rubenstein, as a revered Chopin musical interpreter. The cumulation of these three sources eloquently emphasize the didactic nature of Chopin’s music and further empathizes with American lives in the 40’s and 50’s. I had elected to veer towards a music theme as I had interest in the expressiveness of piano pieces and had noticed that there were more options in the music and sound archives. The collage begins with truncated musical bars from Chopin’s Waltz Op.64 No. 2 scattered chaotically across the canvas. I came across this source through the British sound library. Browsing its vast collection, the category of Classical music caught my attention, with sub-categories of famous pianists’ and their works being accessible. Having prior experience with music, especially in piano, I was compelled towards a study of Chopin’s pieces, specifically Waltz Op. 64 No. 2. The source was an audio recording of this piano piece performed by Arthur Rubenstein, however for the purposes of the collage I used extracts of its musical score. Chopin’s pieces are renowned for being expressive and complex with constant fluctuations to emotions. This particular piece works from a subtle and eased tempo, suggesting tranquility and mindfulness, however as the piece develops so does its cadence. In the body of the Waltz, Rubenstein explodes with passion striking notes with anger and haste, expressing Chopin’s complicated past accentuating every despondent moment of his desolate life, contrasting it to his peaceful beginnings. This is reflected in the collage through the sliced and haphazardly placed musical bars. These piano bars sit in front of the magazine strip referring to Rubenstein’s play and backstory, as directed by the yellow arrows. Navigating the music magazine archive, I was searching for an article in relation to Chopin. I couldn’t findan article speaking directly to Chopin’s work; however, I did stumble upon an excerpt of a magazine providing a brief overview of Arthur Rubenstein, a prolific pianist who famously performed Chopin’s masterpieces. It essentially promotes his life story, encouraging readers to purchase a record containing his performances on Chopin. This complements the audio recording, not only in that it was also Rubenstein playing in the audio, but it also elucidates Rubenstein’s playing style. His tone is depicted as “rich and flowing” and his style; “immaculate”. The article also states that Rubenstein had emigrated from Poland to the United States following the events of WWII, providing personal context behind his emotions and motivations behind the piano. It can be ascertained that there are correlations between Rubenstein’s and Chopin’s lives which harmoniously combines Chopin’s composing with Rubenstein’s playing to assemble such a stunning audio. The final source unifying the collage lays in a picture of the 1994 comic “Lemme out of here!” and two strips from it illustrating their desire to leave.Lastly, for my third primary source I had planned on coordinating the collage to string together the audioand magazine excerpt with a comic strip. This was awfully challenging, as the comics, cartoons and graphic novels archive was tremendously extensive. This not only affected the loading time of the screen, but also made nuancing searches still relatively difficult. I had begun by searching for comics related to music, and unfortunately there was no such category in the database, albeit having thousandsof comics. Subsequently, I put in a time domain of 1920-1960, the peak of Rubenstein’s career, to capture a scope of how American lifestyle seemed during the time Rubenstein was in America. It was still a large gauge, so I included “lifestyle” to the search engine in hopes of refining it to comical depictions of life from the 20s to 60s and that was when I had chosen “Lemme out of here!” This comic strip has a collection of 7 volumes all portraying differing lifestyles of everyday Americans from 1940-50.All shorts shared a common trope of having a generally good lifestyle, however a desire to leave America whether it be for voyaging into the unknown or an underlying predicament to forsake. I thought this perfectly encapsulated the dichotomy of emotions in Chopin’s Waltz with Griffith, protagonist in one of the shorts, wanting to escape suburban American life for a more enticing experience. The two strips in the collage displays the protagonist experiencing dilemmas in his daily life, exhibiting discontent and subsequently his desire to “escape” his life in America, much like Chopin was trying to “escape” his internal struggles.This Chop’in collage summates conflict and uncertainty in approaching the future. The audio recording, magazine excerpt and comic strip work harmoniously to depict the flux of emotion in music and in everyday