I want to believe that Vos has a very eastern aesthetic. Bells, ribbons, flags and wind chimes being heavily utilized. Any things that moves and flutters in the breeze. Emphasising wind and air, two things seekers are very familiar with.
Towers would be decorated with tassels and ribbons during festivals and celebrations.
Dancing, flying, and singing are very admired in this culture. There are entire districts dedicated to expressing and perfecting the vosian aesthetic.
When it comes to music, i feel wood wind instruments, there were a variety of large and small drums, gongs, chimes, flutes, and stringed instruments, such as the imported mandolin-like biwa, the flat six-stringed zither, and/or the thirteen stringed koto. Drums would be used to represent sonic booms created by jets surpassing the sound barrier. Their music could be light and airy or thunderous and loud.
Most seekers are painted to standout in the crowd but not to be garish. They follow color theory and tend to choose complementary colors.
Depending on the circumstance, Picking a new paint could be a casual affair or a political statement.
For their military personnel, they are painted with camouflage in mind. A light underbelly and a dark top, they would be difficult to see from above and below. Certain colors were only allowed to be used by active service members such as red accents and yellow for the Sky Lord.
When it comes to Vos’ overall architecture and design it’s very similar to Art Nouveau, very decorative and filled with curved and twisted motifs that mimic the movements of an aircraft in flight.
But less gold. It’s more Silver.
Expects skylights and colored glass to be prevalent. Fliers do like to have an unbroken visual of the sky. And lots of colors.
I want to believe that Vos has a very eastern aesthetic. Bells, ribbons, flags and wind chimes being heavily utilized. Any things that moves and flutters in the breeze. Emphasising wind and air, two things seekers are very familiar with.
Towers would be decorated with tassels and ribbons during festivals and celebrations.
Dancing, flying, and singing are very admired in this culture. There are entire districts dedicated to expressing and perfecting the vosian aesthetic.
When it comes to music, i feel wood wind instruments, there were a variety of large and small drums, gongs, chimes, flutes, and stringed instruments, such as the imported mandolin-like biwa, the flat six-stringed zither, and/or the thirteen stringed koto. Drums would be used to represent sonic booms created by jets surpassing the sound barrier. Their music could be light and airy or thunderous and loud.
Most seekers are painted to standout in the crowd but not to be garish. They follow color theory and tend to choose complementary colors.
Depending on the circumstance, Picking a new paint could be a casual affair or a political statement.
For their military personnel, they are painted with camouflage in mind. A light underbelly and a dark top, they would be difficult to see from above and below. Certain colors were only allowed to be used by active service members such as red accents and yellow for the Sky Lord.
Speaking of mighty needs, does any Transformers continuity have official holidays? Cultural, or religious?
Some things come to mind but I think…they are fanon?
i see all spark day has already been mentioned in reblogs, but additionally in that episode blades mentions a “festival of primes” which i don’t think we know anything else about lol
best part of Dark Cybertron, personally, was confirmation that the Lost Light is littered with bulletin boards that people fill with all sort of stupid stuff. Also – Ratchet – are you really guilting people into going for their physical by making them think they might have cybercrosis??
[image: Comics panel showing a holographic bulletin board with a number of overlapping, brightly colored advertisements.
“Xaaron’s Debating Society Upcoming Topics: Forged / Constructed Cold”
“Oil Reservoir Tours”
“Swerve’s: Everyone Welcome* No Guns, No Swords, No Briefcases…*Restrictions Apply”
“Are you making the most of your alt mode? Don’t take your transformation Cog for Granted”
“Autobot Code Refresher Course. Ignorance is no Excuse. 10,000 Pages in Only Two Weeks”
“Your Badge: Wear it Straight. Wear it Proud.”
“Coping with Grief See Rung, Level 3(W)”
“Cybercrosis: The Hidden Killer, Free Check-Ups See Ratchet Medibay One”
Okay so I have no idea how to start this little blog of mine but I might as well start here.
Our first post shall be on Cybertronian music.
I have five headcanons on what Cybertronian music would sound like, how it would be created and what purpose it served.
1) Artificially created.
Okay so this is probably the most human sounding one on the list, but it still sounds pretty mechanical. This idea was one of the last I thought up but definitely the most unique.
Cybertronians don’t ‘sing’ sure they can pitch their vocalisers but that’s not singing for them that’s just talking with a musical tone, huge difference. Because of this no Cybertronian really has a talent for singing apart from the ones who were specially created for it, so ‘pure from the Cybertronian’ music would be a rare thing to hear, especially midway through and after the war. The A.I system needed to pitch the music, pitch the lyrics, know how to put both together and make it sound pleasant was really complex and really big.
Songs would be created through a specific computer module that had no other purpose that to basically remix voice clips of Cybertronians. It would drastically pitch and mix these voice clips together to create words, sentences, and lyrics. Sometimes the lyrics would mean something, but often they wouldn’t and they’d just be random clips pitched right to flow together. It would also create music or tones that were complimentary to the pitched lyrics.
So, what was created wouldn’t really be music it would be complimentary tones and pitches with words melded in. This would be where culturally different and personally different music opinions came from in Cybertronian society. Seeker’s whose language is much higher pitched would find lower tones ‘not nice’ to listen to, so their complimentary tones would be much higher and clipped than that of Polyhex music that used much wider pitches.
Personal preferences would be different because many Cybertronians auditory systems are hooked up differently for different jobs. Because of this personal preference could easily be predicted if you knew what the auditory systems were for each job. So, Praxian officers had a much lower pitch range so they could access the enforcer ‘radio’ sort of thing, so in turn, lower pitches would be preferred and Vosvian level ones would hurt.
What would sound ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ to a Cybertronian though would not sound like anything bearable to a human. Luckily most of the song would be above and below the human sound range, doesn’t mean what can be heard doesn’t sound bloody eerie though. Look up a song called ‘Mr Shadow: a song composed by Artificial Intelligence’ on YouTube and this is sort of what I imagine for this type of music. (Warning, creepy, especially the last twenty seconds.)
2) Quick beat, quick step.
Next would be the much more robotic sounding (???) seriously I have no idea. Its human counterpart would be Extratone by the way. (It’s an incredibly acquired taste, so don’t look it up if don’t want a headache.) Look up ‘Diabarha – Crazy Beauties’ , ‘Diabarha – Uranoid (Extratone)’ or ‘7!cHO – Murder EXTRATONE’ to see what I mean. This would be the slowest their songs would go since Vosvian ones would speed up so fast it would just sound like one long high pitched or pulsating tone to a human.
This one, in all honesty, sounds a lot more mechanical and sequenced, with the beats fast and the lyrics are far and few in-between. Since the Cybertronian language (or at least my version of it) is quick, harsh and computerized the music would be equal to this. Like the artificially created music, it would be easiest and most reasonable to create it with a whole system, not just one installed on a Cybertronian.
But unlike the other music type, it would be much easier to perform with installed frame tech, it’s not running hundreds of algorithms to get pitching and timing just right the Cybertronian in question would just need to know how to create a beat and mix it with light background music. It wouldn’t be that hard and wouldn’t take up ‘cpu’ space.
The music is mainly hard and quick beats with most songs not even having music behind it. The pitches would go up and down and once again follow to pitch rules of the above type. With Vosvian pitches reaching incredibly high but Kaon incredibly low. Vosvian song would generally be faster too as they had the processing power to keep up with the 5000+ beats their songs often used.
There was the synthetic beat music, and the Cybertronian made music. Synthetic would be made from a specialised computer that wouldn’t burn out and was created only for creating the synthetic beat songs. Cybertronian made songs were forced to be slower since they had to manually input commands to hit a beat in the sound system they had installed for this. Each beat had to be pre-coded with the backing sound and a CPU could only take so much.
The Cybertronian society that used this music would’ve used it for much at all and had little cultural meaning or ‘words’ behind any of it. It was mostly made for fun by mecha that had the time to pitch code and had the systems to support the harsh sounds. Teenagers would sometimes have these sound systems installed in them and would create these songs on the go up against one another on stage. They would see who could get the fastest and coherent beat without burning out something important from exertion.
3) Scare
This once less its own idea and more of an extension to quick beat, quick step and would be the only type of music here to require an instrument. This music would be constant wavering tones normally with shrieks or cutting metal in the background, it wasn’t really a music for anything and was supposed to be sat down and listened to.
Most of the music would be made personally and with an original touch on each one. It was designed to ‘twang’ certain audio cords of very specific mecha so there were ones attuned to maybe one or two different types of frame and sub-frame, but the tones couldn’t be enjoyed by any other frame as it would hit the wrong personal pitches and ‘hurt.’
It could be played live if one collected enough mecha of the chosen chord, the song itself would mix the musical instruments sound and personal sounds made by the composer up on stage. It wasn’t a thing ‘just anybody’ could do either, the spark had to be able to ‘attune’ certain pitches and sounds through the E.M field and it was an incredibly rare skill.
‘Merzbow-Requiem’ Just turn the audio down as low as it can go, it’s an even more required taste than Extracore and in all honesty, I can’t listen to it for that long. But it’s an incredibly interesting feat in human music so, yea…
4) Tonal
Seriously this would be the most alien one on here and is personally my favorite one and the one I think would be most plausible. I’m not even going to explain what this is but look up the song called ‘Maxwell’s Demon [Lowercase/Field Recording/Drone] ~ Gen Thalz’ and listen to all of it, it will be a weird experience, I promise.
It would truly be an alien concept of music and Cybertronians would dig this sh!t. The music would be created personally by recording the world around them and once again messing with the pitches. It would never have any sort of lyrics to it as Cybertronians weren’t designed to be ‘singers.’ The more odd and indecipherable the sound the more ‘out there’ and ‘cool’ the song would be.
Vosvians would have recordings of engines and morphed beyond reason sounds of the wind and acidic rain. Polyhexian’s would have the least morphed sound usually consisting of clangs of metal and skidding wheels. Praxians would just have morphed sound of cogs and mechanics turning and clashing.
All of these would be smooshed together with complimentary higher and lower tones, once again going from the tone preferences above. Warbles, harsh buzzes, and screeches would occasionally accompany the ‘music’ too, but that was for the younger generation. Old mecha like Ratchet would just prefer to listen to music when the music was ‘normal’ and low tones were accompanied with only things like smashing glass and breaking cogs. Like it should be.
5) Silence
No, no, honestly, I’m being serious here. When I say that silence to a Cybertronian *is*, in fact, their music I mean it. I doubt you need an example.
A Cybertronians life would’ve been consumed with regular city sounds or building and the constant sound of cars. In ships, it would’ve been the constant hum of engines and everywhere else on Cybertron there would have been constant sound, constant loud, unbearable sound. Even in ‘silence’ the hum of their own engines and workings would accompany them.
True silence would have been bliss and literal music to their ears. True silence would be enjoyed by a mecha alone, preferably in their quarters with their entire audio systems down, in this time they truly ‘listen’ to the world around them.
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Anyway, hope you liked this, even though I kind of expect you to have only skimmed it. Culture and stuff seem to only interest me and a few others nowadays. Anyway, expect sort of regular updates. xxx
“What would sound ‘nice’ and ‘pleasant’ to a Cybertronian though would not sound like anything bearable to a human. Luckily most of the song would be above and below the human sound range, doesn’t mean what can be heard doesn’t sound bloody eerie though.”
One of the great things about world-building an entire alien species and their world is one gets to redefine concepts we take for granted. Here I’m taking a look at an aspect of Cybertronian culture, bouncing off the canon of Transformers Prime and the background novels, and my question is, what is beauty?
We can all probably agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it is subjective, it varies, and many different cultures and communities have their own vision of beauty. But they all talk about beauty. Its form might vary, but it’s still a concept of its own. Beauty is something pleasant to look at, something good and desirable, and in everyday context usually talked about as a set of standards: these are the standards to reach for in order to obtain beauty.
So beauty can be defined as a set of desired features, and those features are all something that (most) people within a culture find appealing.
Considering how Cybertron used to be dominated by an ideology “form dictates function” and how all of Cybertronians were classified into different categories, in the novel Exodus into castes. In Transformers Prime there was talk about “increasing inequality among the masses”, and this notion fits the caste system lore. So Cybertronians were harshly divided, and this system of seperation was also regional: certain areas of the planet were focused on certain types of industries and thus populated mainly by certain frame types and castes. During the War for Cybertron we see this regional seperation becoming the lines between Autobots and Decepticons, and for example Kaon is called “the Decepticon capital”.
So if castes (and frame types and lifestyles) are this absolutely seperated, it would make sense that things like beauty standards that are so strongly subjective and bound to the culture would also vary. Thus, Cybertronian standards of beauty are based on function: beauty is fitting the assigned function admirably. What the function to reach for is varies by region, caste, and frame type.
There are areas focused on raw industries and mining, such as Kaon, Tarn and Blaster City, and those cities are populated by heavy frame types fit for that kind of work. Kaon also has the gladiator culture, so the region admires strong warrior types and most likely favors weapon mods.
Crystal City is the capital of arts and science, and thus home for intellectuals and innovators. It most likely houses several very different castes that are practically equal as far as social ladder is considered, but still very different. New things are favored, things like fashion and decorations and self-expression, and there are several subcultures with their own standards and norms.
Iacon is the capital, and usually capitals house the widest range of different people. There are the richest and the poorest. The high political power and the upper class, but also a lot of middle class workers, business owners and merchants, blue collar workers, and also the poor low caste people. In a society that’s founded on compartmentalization and functionality, different classes are most likely divided into different neighborhoods. This means that Iaconian beauty as one easily identified thing doesn’t exist, but instead several different classes focus on their own and try to seperate themselves from the others. The only real common thing is to try to look better than you are.
As for other regions, there are most likely cities built around certain industries like Kaon and Tarn are built around mining and factories. Each city has their own mix of people and their own focus, a regional identity of sorts, and they are more defined than Iacon that is a mixture of everything.
So Cybertron has several definitions of beauty, some of them so different from each other that a bot from one region wouldn’t even recognize another region’s beauty as such.
For example, a great beauty in Kaon is someone big and strong who flourishes in the harsh environment, someone tough, salt of the earth type, preferably dangerous. For some middle- or upper-class bot from Iacon that beauty would look crude and barbaric since those features have nothing to do with the life in Iacon. Iaconian would be practical, middle-sized city bot with clean and shiny paint and some neat upgrade or mod, because truly beautiful bots can afford that and they show that they care. A neat and clean bot is a sociable one, someone who fits the demanding capital social circles. Other regions are like this as well, with their own sets of functions, standards and lifestyle ideals set by the local culture, and each definition of beauty is unrecognizable to someone who’s not part of that culture.
To sum this half-meta, half-headcanon thing up, I could say that my approach to Cybertronian beauty is function. Function is in the core of the culture of each region, and whether they like it or not that affects everything and everyone. Also there’s something truly appealing in the idea that beauty is indeed in the eye of a beholder, so much so that one bot’s beauty is ugly to another.
ok art’s, like, not a thing on tfa cybertron (nobody knew what it was in headmaster) but they also have these giant stained glass windows??
does this not count as art or…
You know what, Transformers Animated has so many plot holes for their culture I’ve genuinely spend time thinking about them. For example Blitzwing in episode 11 ‘Lost and Found’ tells Lugnut:
[Lugnut stomps on a lunar rover by mistake] Blitzwing: [Hothead] Careful, you copper-clad klutz! You stepped in something! Blitzwing: [switches to Random] But with a few dancing lessons, you’ll be light on your stabilizing servos like me! Cha-cha-cha!
So Decepticons have dance, but not music because Megatron calls Sari’s music ‘odd sound patterns’
BUT Rosanna is an Autobot singer: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Rosanna_(Animated) so they have singing as a concept on Cybertron. Does that mean dancing is done to singing back on cybertron? Or is it by some other means?
Also, regarding art, in the official Transformers animated comic, The Arrival, set during the pilot of TFA; Blitzwing is is a public speaker at Megatron’s funeral, and he built a statue to commemorate Megatron, does that not count as art?
I have put too much thought into this cartoon.
same tho,,
ok ok maybe it’s that only younger autobots don’t know what art is. maybe it used to be a thing waaay back when, even before ratchet was around, but then they stopped doing it for some reason. maybe decepticons have a healthy art community.
and—wait, isn’t rosanna a decepticon double agent or something? it’s implied that she’s flip sides, isn’t it? so actually decepticons… should know what music is, right? or was that just not important enough for megatron to teach himself about? maybe cybertronian music is different from earth music or something?
I feel like Cybertron is a place that doesn’t consider any media that honors political figures as “art”. We would consider it art but not Cybertronians. In the TFA Almanac it says that there is an Art division on Cybertron. So probably their definition of art is different from ours. I feel like in every continuity Earth is considered more diverse than Cybertron in terms of art and music.
I dont remember anyone saying Transformers dont have music. Megatron might not consider Sari’s music to be actually music. It’s like when someone hates a certain genre of music so much they don’t consider it music.
ok art’s, like, not a thing on tfa cybertron (nobody knew what it was in headmaster) but they also have these giant stained glass windows??
does this not count as art or…
You know what, Transformers Animated has so many plot holes for their culture I’ve genuinely spend time thinking about them. For example Blitzwing in episode 11 ‘Lost and Found’ tells Lugnut:
[Lugnut stomps on a lunar rover by mistake] Blitzwing: [Hothead] Careful, you copper-clad klutz! You stepped in something! Blitzwing: [switches to Random] But with a few dancing lessons, you’ll be light on your stabilizing servos like me! Cha-cha-cha!
So Decepticons have dance, but not music because Megatron calls Sari’s music ‘odd sound patterns’
BUT Rosanna is an Autobot singer: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Rosanna_(Animated) so they have singing as a concept on Cybertron. Does that mean dancing is done to singing back on cybertron? Or is it by some other means?
Also, regarding art, in the official Transformers animated comic, The Arrival, set during the pilot of TFA; Blitzwing is is a public speaker at Megatron’s funeral, and he built a statue to commemorate Megatron, does that not count as art?
I have put too much thought into this cartoon.
same tho,,
ok ok maybe it’s that only younger autobots don’t know what art is. maybe it used to be a thing waaay back when, even before ratchet was around, but then they stopped doing it for some reason. maybe decepticons have a healthy art community.
and—wait, isn’t rosanna a decepticon double agent or something? it’s implied that she’s flip sides, isn’t it? so actually decepticons… should know what music is, right? or was that just not important enough for megatron to teach himself about? maybe cybertronian music is different from earth music or something?
Cybertronian Database 