Influence of “indeterminate music” on visual art: a phenomenological, semiotic and fractal exploration

Abstract

Indeterminacy in music, a well known neo-avant-garde approach of composing sound where some features of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter’s free choice, became noticeable among some American music composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff in the mid 20th century. Simultaneously, a group of artists from the West created “abstract expressionism” in visual arts, which showed a strong resemblance with this “indeterminate music”, both using two kinds of abstract languages. The commonality among these two art forms is the free improvisation of creative activity. The correspondence between the indeterminate music induced emotions and the depicted emotional contents in paintings is a relevant area which is still scientifically unexplored. To investigate the same, we conducted a case study where a visual artist listened to four music clips composed by the above mentioned musicians and created four paintings. The visual artist is strongly inspired by the abstract expressionist methods and these methods lend well to inspirational work based on listening to indeterminate music.To understand the nature of intermediality, if any, that exists between “indeterminate music” and “evoked abstraction” in paintings, the artist’s phenomenological interpretations of the process was compared with detailed semiotic analysis of specific musical and visual elements and the nature of their relatedness. Fractal analysis in the form of Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) was also done on both the acoustic waveforms of the chosen music clips and the corresponding paintings to explore possible correlations. Some unique findings yielded from the analysis, which hint toward strong correlation between the prominent musical features of indeterminate music and the prominent visual features of the paintings inspired by them. This novel study has the potential to offer both new methodology as well as better understanding the features of intermediality between “indeterminate music” and visual art.