Visual Music

Realtime sound visualisation made with "Partitura"

by Abstract Birds and Quayola, sound by Telefon Tel Aviv

Via Vimeo: "Partitura is a custom software to generate realtime graphics aimed at visualising sound. The term Partitura (score) implies a connection with music, and this metaphor is the main focus of the project. Partitura aims to create a new system for translating sound into visual forms. Inspired by the studies of artists such as Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, the images generated by Partitura are based on a precise and coherent system of relationships between various types of geometries. The main characteristic of this system is its horizontal linear structure, like that of a musical score. It is along this linear environment that the different classes of abstract elements are created and evolve over time according to the sound. Partitura creates endless ever-evolving abstract landscapes that can respond to musical structures, audio analysis and manual gestural inputs. It is an instrument that visualises sound with both the freedom of spontaneous personal interpretation/improvisation and at the same time maintaining the automations and triggers of mathematical precision."

Thanks to Christian Sander and Tobias Gallé!

[ 05/13/2011, Visual Music ]

Bumbum Box

Inter-dependentnotation

Via Heart Chamber Orchestra: "The Heart Chamber Orchestra – HCO – is an audiovisual performance. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH.

Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. The musical score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them.

HCO forms a structure where music literally comes from the heart.

The debut performance of HCO was in Trondheim/Norway in October 2006, during the festival for electronic arts and new technology, Trondheim Matchmaking. The orchestra was the Trondheim Sinfonietta."

Thanks to Georg Brüx!

[ 03/29/2011, Visual Music ]

Page 5 of Composition No. 377, featuring an airport terminal, overlaid with a transparency showing trill notation

What I Call a Sound

Anthony Braxton's Synaesthetic Ideal and Notations for Improvisers

Via Non Projects: "What he sees as trans-idiomatic and trans-global, cultural purists of all hues still decry as transgressive. The challenge for players, for listeners, is to move beyond what Braxton refers to as the traditional parameters, as they have been defined; to escape from the little boxes labelled jazz tradition or authentic blackness or European only and all the other markers of exclusivity. Against these petty fundamentalisms Braxton sets his synaesthetic ideal of unity and openness, with its many aesthetic-cum-political implications, from personal affirmation to global harmony. And if the power and the beauty of his music can persuade us that the ideal is both desirable and attainable (because it works in performance), then his unique auditory perception, his vision of what he calls a sound, may help to change the way we all hear music — and see the world."

Thanks to Phillip Schulze and Christian Schäfer!

Also, check out the online home of composer Anthony Braxton.

[ 03/16/2011, Visual Music ]

Expanded Cinema

A Bibliography by the Center for Visual Music

The Center for Visual Music is a wonderful, awe-inspiring and stunning resource. It is one-of-a-kind.

CVM director, Cindy Keefer, send me the link to their Expanded Cinema online bibliography. Go check it out and get lost.

[ 02/15/2011, Visual Music ]

Human Bodies

The Subject of Percussive Video Composition

Via Create Digital Motion: "Call it full-body percussion. Kasumi's soundboardshort film centers on sliced footage of dancers, composed into an audiovisual rhythm. It's brief but nicely focused. I can almost feel the weight of the movement. More notes from the work's creator:

This piece is as much about the sound as is it the image. Using only the percussive sounds of the dancers' bodies hitting the floor and each other, I created the audio mix by layering the un-effected sounds in Ableton Live, while simultaneously cutting up the video. I am immensely grateful to Didier Feldmann, whose brilliant color-grading raised the aesthetic level of this work many, many notches. Thanks of course, to Christopher Bell and Da-Rell Townes, for their willingness to experiment.

It's worth checking out her other work on Vimeo and her own site; Kasumi has collaborated with the likes of DJ Spooky and Grandmaster Flash and the New York Phil and got the attention of the Vimeo remix awards."

Thanks to Christian Sander!

[ 01/14/2011, Visual Music ]

Synesthesia and Relayed Art Experience

by Daniel Shea

Via Ahorn Magazine: "Scientists have successfully shown that when babies are stimulated sonically or visually the corresponding neural sensory mode will not be the one firing. For example, a baby will hear a loud noise but neurons in her sight modality will fire. Simply put, a baby can hear sights, see noises, and touch smells, and does so frequently. As a result a baby lives in a disorienting cognitive stage in which sensual boundaries are still developing.

This condition is not unique to early childhood, as many adults have developed fixed cognitive functions that classify as synesthesia. The neurobiological mechanisms of synesthesia work as follows; stimuli in one sensory modality registers as a sensory experience in a different modality. The most popularly referenced synesthetic function is grapheme-colour synesthesia, in which graphemes (letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.) illicit a strong color association from the synesthete. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky famously used his synesthetic condition to relay cross-faculty experience in artistic depiction. Kandinsky paintings arrange musical composition as it relates to his color and movement-based associations of them."

[ 12/04/2010, Visual Music ]

Design for Music

Eye magazine's first-ever music design special

From Eye: "Over the years we have published many articles about design for music, but this is Eye's first-ever special issue on this dynamic and continually inspiring sector. Designers are in a privileged position to add visual drama to music; to make it more understandable and enjoyable; to communicate the intangible essence of vibrating air molecules into the worlds of words, images and moving graphics. Design can make music look good, but when they really work together you have magic."

Thanks to Christian Schäfer!

[ 09/18/2010, Visual Music ]

Visual Music Archive

A non-institutional and highly subjective collection.

During my sabbatical 2009/10 I started building an online archive for Visual Music. Since the Visual Music Archive is not a blog it accumulates slowly and steadily, and shall continue to far into the future.

To seek completeness in the field of fine arts seems rather eerie. A wunderkammer, on the other hand, is far more interesting, challenging, and provides inspiring impulses. As a library's inner sanctum.

I love the intelligent design by Chewing The Sun and the elegant CMS architecture by Julian Furthkamp.

The Visual Music Archive is supported by the International Music Residencies program of the Goethe-Institut Germany and the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.

[ 06/10/2010, Visual Music ]

What makes music sound so sweet

(or not)

From EurekAlert: "Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Twentieth-century composers, on the other hand, have leaned toward the notion that musical tastes are really all in what you are used to hearing. [...]

The researchers' results show that musical chords sound good or bad mostly depending on whether the notes being played produce frequencies that are harmonically related or not. Beating didn't turn out to be as important. Surprisingly, the preference for harmonic frequencies was stronger in people with experience playing musical instruments. In other words, learning plays a role — perhaps even a primary one, McDermott argues.

Whether you would get the same result in people from other parts of the world remains to be seen, McDermott says, but the effect of musical experience on the results suggests otherwise. 'It suggests that Westerners learn to like the sound of harmonic frequencies because of their importance in Western music. Listeners with different experience might well have different preferences.' The diversity of music from other cultures is consistent with this. 'Intervals and chords that are dissonant by Western standards are fairly common in some cultures,' he says. 'Diversity is the rule, not the exception.' "

[ 05/30/2010, Visual Music ]

Something Shiny Slips Away, oil on aluminium panel, 2014

Brain mechanisms

Like a summer with a thousand July's, you intoxicate my soul with your eyes

From ScienceBlogs: "Subjective experience poses a major problem for neuroscientists and philosophers alike, and the relationship between them and brain function is particularly puzzling. How can I know that my perception of the colour red is the same as yours, when my experience of the colour occupies a private mental world to which nobody else has access? How is the sensory information from an object transformed into an experience that enters conscious awareness? The neural mechanisms involved are like a black box, whose inner workings are a complete mystery.

In synaesthesia, the information entering one sensory system gives rise to sensations in another sensory modality. Letters can evoke colours, for example, and movements can evoke sounds. These extraordinary additional sensations therefore offer a unique opportunity to investigate how the subjective experiences of healthy people are related to brain function. Dutch psychologists now report that different types of synaesthetic experiences are associated with different brain mechanisms, providing a rare glimpse into the workings of the black box."

[ 05/20/2010, Visual Music ]