Abstract
Creators of visual music face the challenge of retaining their own artistic impetus amidst an overwhelming choice of instruments, aesthetics, practice, techniques and technologies brought about by the impinging presence of a vast sea of data and tools. Navigating the data-driven ephemerality of artistic technology and its market-driven constraints by utilising strategies similar to composer Ron Kuivila’s (1998) for getting ‘under’, ‘over’ and ‘into’ will be examined with the aim of elucidating methodologies for creating works that other artistic practitioners may find useful.Leading pioneers of visual music were, of necessity, innovators of technology as well as visual musicians and artists. There is an intrinsic tension between developing new technology in order to re-imagine how music can be made visible and technological pioneers succumbing to the fascination of exploring the technology itself. Understanding aspects of perception, such as rhythm, is key to developing new technologies and processes in ways that avoid this pitfall and keep the experience of visual music central. Audio-visual synchronisation and rhythm are vital to create, in the seminal computer artist John Whitney’s words: ‘an art that should look like music sounds’ (1980: front dust jacket).Integrating the body, human traces and especially the human voice into visual music compositions underpins the key objective which is to create work that is non-narrative, ‘abstracted animation’1 (Watkins, 2015), and yet suffused with human presence and emotion. Visual music can be perceived as overly repetitive, cold and alienating if it seems to embody a purely mechanical alignment of music to image, or if it seems disengaged from both human emotions and natural imagery. This paper is part of an on-going investigation into developing methodologies for composing new abstract visual music pieces and, ultimately, parameters for a visual musical instrument.
Highlights
As Friedmann Dahn asserts, ‘[visual music] should be visible music, music made visible or, to expand the term an equal and meaningful synthesis of the visible and audible, and is its own art form’ (Dahn in Lund & Lund, 2009: 149)
Within visual music the possibility of creating a synthesis of the visible and audible has been debated in terms as varied as synaesthesia and a 1:1 mapping; new possibilities afforded by current technology and new research into perception and multi-modality has given this debate new life (Gallese, 2016)
In response to work that has a more mechanical mapping the aim is to use current technology to create new visual music that affords ‘soft fascination’; works of ‘abstracted animation’ that are suffused with human presence and emotion
Summary
As Friedmann Dahn asserts, ‘[visual music] should be visible music, music made visible or, to expand the term an equal and meaningful synthesis of the visible and audible, and is its own art form’ (Dahn in Lund & Lund, 2009: 149). John Whitney did not use 1:1 mappings, but developed ‘differential dynamics’, i.e. linked nested, or interrelated motion paths, the result of which is that shapes are overlaid, creating harmonic visual patterns via computer algorithms.[6] This was a result of noting that rhythm in music and rhythm in vision are very different: often referred to as the drive of a piece of music, is almost automatically enhanced with metrical or cyclical consistency and repetition. The viewer adds sync to the visual detail, demonstrating our liking for, and ability to create, synchronous events This combination of the human voice as impetus to ‘gestural animation’, initiated with ‘absolute synchronisation point’ is key to my works creating a meaningful synthesis between the visual and the auditory. This ability to re-mix and review is very much a product of our digital technology
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