Particles and Bloom

Wüstenarchitekten and Brian Eno

Christian Sander sent me two interesting links: 

A particle simulation in TouchDesigner to Pan Sonic's Askel from their Album A by Toronto based Wüstenarchitekten.

And a YouTube video on how to use Bloom, which is a generative music application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

[ Visual Music ]

Takeshi Murata

Synaesthetic experiments

Via Electronic Arts Intermix: "Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that refigure the experience of animation. Creating Rorschach-like fields of seething color, form and motion, Murata pushes the boundaries of digitally manipulated psychedelia. With a powerfully sensual force that is expressed in videos, loops, installations, and electronic music, Murata's synaesthetic experiments in hypnotic perception appear at once seductively organic and totally digital." Also check out his video Silver (2006).

Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!

[ Visual Music ]

Anne Harild's animations

In collaboration with Edmund Finnis and Orlando Higginbottom

From Eye blog: "Danish artist Anne Harild is nominally an illustrator (who studied at the University of the Arts London and at the Royal College of Art), yet her work challenges many interpretations of the term. [...]

Harild's short animations, in collaboration with contemporary composers Edmund Finnis and Orlando Higginbottom, seem like short, animated dispatches from an unknown future, not so much Monsters vs Aliens as objects versus spaces."

[ Visual Music ]

Got goggles?

David O'Reilly for M.I.A.

Via David O'Reilly: "Here are some stage visuals I recently did for M.I.A.. The deadline for this was extremely tight, everything was done in a few days in preparation for her Coachella gig last weekend. [...]

You can view this with red/cyan glasses, the gun's distortion is in true 3d space."

[ Visual Music ]

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media

Edited by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund

Via fluctuating images: "The multifaceted nature of visual music was already evident in its early historical incarnations. These ranged from live performances with the ocular harpsichord through oscilloscope techniques to animated films. And the scope for variety has now been further extended by the new possibilities offered by advances in media technology, and by the ever-expanding array of digital visual and acoustic formats and techniques. Thus, we really prefer not to discuss visual music - and this is a basic theme underlying this book - as if it were a clearly defined genre. Nonetheless, the term can be useful as a description for audiovisual productions pursuing the basic objective of evenly balanced or equilibrated interplay between visual and acoustic components. These productions can involve cinematic images and music, or lights projections and acoustic patterns, or even digital live drawing and field recordings - huge variations in technique and style are possible. Thus, it would seem that visual music is found in different places, and in very diverse contexts and formats. But there are also contexts and formats that particularly favor audiovisual interaction in the form of visual music: abstract visualization of music in animated film, for example, or live exchanges between musicians and visual artists."

[ Visual Music ]

Brilliant Noise

by Semiconductor

UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt's 2006 piece Brilliant Noise is absolutely worth checking out.

Via their website: "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies." 

[ Visual Music ]
halb klein

Computer Music Journal

On Visual Music

If you are interested in Visual Music the Computer Music Journal Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 2005 published by The MIT Press is an essential reading.

Via their website: "Established in 1977 as the definitive journal of its field, Computer Music Journal (CMJ) covers a wide range of topics such as digital audio signal processing, electroacoustic composition, new musical controllers, and music information retrieval. With cutting-edge scholarship accompanied by interviews with leading composers and informative reviews of products and publications, CMJ is an indispensable resource for composers, performers, scientists, engineers, and computer enthusiasts interested in computer-generated sound and music. [...]

The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of visual music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition."

[ Visual Music ]

Father of computer animation

John Whitney

William Moritz profiled the career of John Whitney and his significant contribution to computer animation in his article Digital Harmony: The Life of John Whitney, Computer Animation Pioneer. From this text: "In the later 1980s, Whitney concentrated on developing a computerized instrument on which one could compose visual and musical output simultaneously in real time. His first piece on this new instrumentation, which was improved and updated constantly, appeared as Spirals in 1987."

[ Visual Music ]

Optical Poetry

The life and work of Oskar Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger's biography Optical Poetry by William Moritz not only gives inside on the production of the 50-something films and around 800 paintings by the godfather of Visual Music, the book also tells the story of the immigrants during WW2 in Los Angeles. If you are interested in Bildmusik of any kind this book is a must-read.

One coincidence that I really enjoy: Fischinger's accountant, booking agent and secretary back in Berlin shared my last name (see page 46). We might be relatives of some sort...

[ Visual Music ]

Ryoji Ikeda

Audiovisual concerts and installations

Via Ryoji Ikeda: "Japan's leading electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound's physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space."

Take your time to discover Ryoji Ikeda's work.
 

[ Visual Music ]