Fifty Years of Composing Computer Music and Graphics: How Time's New Solid-State Tractability Has Changed Audio-Visual Perspectives

Abstract

A partnership is developing that offers a special complementarity of relationship between musical and visual design. With this new partnership we are learning to compose a unique counterpoint by means of computer algorithms. I would define the algorithms that we use as the routines of computer instructions that generate coordinated color design with music through solid-state operations, as a real-time event. These algorithms can be composed interactively on many of the fast personal computers (PCs). Only recently have computers acquired a musicand graphics-generating capability, which often can be installed in one computer instrument. This has become what we rightfully may call the artist's first universal machine: an instrument for composing time-based audio and visual modalities. Founded upon my own vision of just such a 'universal machine' long before the first computers, my study of colorin-motion began as a search for various germinal aesthetic principals directed toward developing a fine art that might employ that instrument. When I later gained access to computers, my explorations of what I began to call 'digital harmony' gradually revealed to me a world of pure fluid graphics. I uncovered aesthetic concepts that suggested how differential functions within a wide variety of geometric algorithms generate order-disorder graphics in a world of abstract design in motion. A typical order-disorder algorithm might distribute points in a field that would appear to be scattered at random, while moments later (some computer displays later), the points might evolve by differential progression into an obvious pattern of order, forming, perhaps, an elegant rose curve. Order that resolves to disorder, or disorder that resolves to order and repose, is like a musical resolution. The similarities that these tem-