A non-institutional and highly subjective collection.

During my sabbatical 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.

(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.'"

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."

by Barbara Hero

From Dangerous Minds: "The Lambdoma Matrix is attributed to the philosopher Pythagoras (500 bc) who spent over twenty years as an Egyptian initiate. The concept of the Lambdoma Matrix in the present age is relatively unknown, and is not cited in most dictionaries. On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a mathematical multiplication and division table. On a closer look however, it bears a one-to-one relationship to musical intervals in a very specific harmonic series. Because of its numerical framework of ratios, it can be translated into frequencies of audible sound. The Lambdoma bears relationships to aromatics, chemistry, crystallography, cybernetics, art, music, geometry, all of which may be explored by those interested in the above disciplines. The Lambdoma bears mathematical relationships to Issac Newton, the Diophantine equations and the Farey series, as well as in the present century to Georg Cantor…"
Check out the video demonstration by Barbara Hero.

American Magnus

From Dangerous Minds: "Artist, alchemical filmmaker, musical archeologist and avant garde shaman, Harry Smith's obsessive interests made him an influential, yet not widely known, figure of 20th century Beat culture and beyond. If Smith was only responsible for preserving the folk and blues musical traditions of early America in his Anthology of American Folk Music set from 1952, we would have him to thank for providing a way forward for a young Bob Dylan and the whole of the 60s/70s folk scene. But Smith was far more than that, he was a filmmaker of astonishing originality, making stop motion animations influenced by 19th advertising art and the elaborate Middle Ages alchemical paintings of Robert Fludd. (...) The restored version of Smith's celluloid tetraptych was a marvel to behold, with all of the four images now perfectly in time to one another, and looking like a great psychedelic kaleidoscope of imagery taken around New York City, in particular the Chelsea Hotel and its bohemian denizens. Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and the Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin all make cameo appearances. Seen, digitally restored and as Smith had intended, it was simply breath taking."
Also check out this interview with Harry Smith.

A film by Stephen Prina

Saw this wonderful film on the Ford House by American architect Bruce Goff (1904-1982) tonight at the Kunstfilmbiennale in Cologne. Artist and musician Stephen Prina managed to beautifully combined very slow tracking shots of the breathtaking interior with fragments of Goff's music compositions.
The film "investigates the architect Bruce Goff's own multi-faceted approach to music, painting and architecture. Shot in Goff's Ford House, the film includes a score by Prina, performed in the house and written using excerpts from Goff's own compositions and correspondence." (from Tate Modern)
"Is this house a love song? Is the film? Certainly it indicates an intense affiliation between Goff's multifaceted practice and Prina's own genre-defying oeuvre. It points to a set of relationships that it does not gossip about. Its subject seems to be synthesis itself, like the model of film as a gesamtkunstwerk. Love is impenetrably private, unconfessable to our public gaze, a series of open circles that remain to us utterly closed. File under research, the way he always wanted (too)." (from ArtReview)
This would be simply the perfect habitat for me. And the pictures above come nowhere close to how it really looks like.

by Jared Ficklin

From DesignMind: "Making sound visible is a hobby of mine. After years pursuing real-time sound visualization, I became intrigued by the idea of eliminating time and allowing listeners to take in an entire song as a single visual impression. The result reveals an unseen beauty. (...)
There is a pretty unique aesthetic to different songs rendered with the same algorithm. I enjoy the notion of someone buying a song because they like the way it looks, or because it looks like a song they know they like. With the right system in hand, would members of the deaf community be interested in creating visualization-based musical performances? What would the music sound like? I also wonder if it is time to update the Closed Captioning system to include visual impressions of the music and sound effects that normally go by unseen in a movie or television show.
(Jared Ficklin is a principal designer at frog design. Jared creates Flash animations of all types, including sound visualizations.)"

A documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler

by Philip Glass (*1937)

From Muppet Wiki: "The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass's music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the 'Dance' numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera."

Animation by Douglas Trumbull, Music by György Ligeti

Every time I watch "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick I can not believe it was delivered 1968. Set to the mind blowing sounds of "Requiem", "Atmospheres" and "Adventures" by György Ligeti the Star Gate sequence by Douglas Trumbull remains a challenge.
Rob Ager offers some ideas how to read this movie, even on the meaning of the monolith. Check it out.

TED Talk by Evan Grant

From TED: "Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds (like dolphin calls), it also makes complex and beautiful designs." (Thanks to Tobias Gallé!)
Also check out this tremendously helpful spreadsheet of every TED talk as of 9/2/2009 (via boingboing). 

by Brian Eno

From Dangerous Minds: "Using sophisticated computer software and audio boom boxes, 77 Million Paintings features constantly changing images and musical compositions, which challenge the notion that the artist must be in control.  Eno's input simply sets the trajectory for the work to evolve into patterns that have the potential for surprising him as well as the audience."

by Lillian F. Schwartz, Music by Jean-Claude Risset

From Olsen website: "Lillian Schwartz is an early pioneer in the use of the computer in the Arts and was a consultant at the AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mutations is based on computer images, laser beams diffracted in plastics, and crystal growth in polarized light. The film features a stunning soundtrack by Jean-Claude Risset."
(Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!)

by Esteban Diácono

From Esteban Diácono's website: "let yourself feel is a project that was inspired by the beautiful music of icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds. i made this trying to do something different, sensitive and of course, good looking =). after i finished it and put it up to vimeo.com, things went crazy."

I'll be gone

From Motionographer: "Taking the simple premise of using a cardiograph (Four of them to be precise) to represent different audio lines within the track, Rimantas manages to create something truly mesmerising. It's one of those, I don't quite know why I like this so much, but I do pieces of work. I guess there's something special about the piece being utterly devoid of visual clutter, and that so much currency is made from the right camera pans and cuts. It's a ballsy move to stay with such a simple set-up throughout the whole promo and Rimantas succeeds in holding the attention without needing to introduce any further imagery. Hats off to him…". Check out more works from Lithuania based direction, design & animation agency Korb.
(Thanks to Tobias Gallé!)

by Berlin's Transforma

Simon Krahl came to my talk in Berlin. Today I had the chance to check out his work. Do yourself a favor and watch some of their brilliant clips, e.g. Bang Out. From their website: "Berlin video artist collective Transforma combine the momentum of improvisation with the power of highly composed imagery and narrative. Transforma started producing experimental video art in 2001 and have been taking their imageworld and production processes to higher levels of absurdity ever since."

Exhibition at Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria

From Lentos' website: "The exhibition See this Sound aims to make several important aspects of this manifold and diverse relationship between image and sound accessible in an interdisciplinary way. The exhibition also conjoins exemplary artistic works and cultural-historical perspectives. (...) The exhibition thus presents not only technical, perceptional and media-reflexive aspects of the coupling of image and sound from the beginning up to the present, but also poetic conceptual aspects that are important to contemporary visual artists today. These are intended to mutually contour one another and illustrate differentiations." The exhibition runs from 28 August 2009 until 10 January 2010. (Thanks to Tristan Thönnissen!)

Wüstenarchitekten and Brian Eno

IMM student 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.

Synaesthetic experiments

The Bielefelder Kunstverein shows Takeshi Murata's Monster Video from May 29th until June 16th 2009. From 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!)

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'."

Animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc for the band Plaid

From boingboing.net: "They were real starlings, not digitally-generated. They were filmed over a few winters here in Brighton. I was lucky enough to have access to the then-abandoned and now destroyed West Pier, and got them down on tape as they were coming in to roost. I then extracted them from the background and edited them to the track, often going back and trying to capture a certain motion to go with a certain bit of audio."

David O'Reilly for M.I.A.

From David O'Reilly's website: "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."
(Thanks to Roland Matusek!)

Edited by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund

The book is a wonderful inspiration for my own research and a new project that is in the pipeline. Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund are moving their gallery fluctuating images to Berlin and I hope to meet with them soon.
From the books editorial: "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."

by Semiconductor

Haven't checked on Semiconductor for quite a while. Meanwhile UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have done some exciting new work. Their 2006 piece Brilliant Noise for example is absolutely worth checking out. From 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." Thanks, Marcus Schmickler!

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. From 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."
And on the Visual Music issue: "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."

John Whitney

Currently I am doing some more research on the grandfathers of Visual Music. Unfortunately there is no DVD with John Whitney's work yet. But there is YouTube... And there is William Moritz, who 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."

The life and work of Oskar Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger's biography 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...

by Ryoji Ikeda

From Ryoji Ikeda's website: "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."
Bought this DVD a while ago and would still highly recommend it. It "is the first complete monograph about the seminal work of Ryoji Ikeda. With superb attention to detail and layout, the publication documents the artist's latest projects and includes brand-new artwork especially produced for the book. At the same time, formula covers Ikeda's landmark concerts and installations." (from Touch Shop)

Call for submissions

The Visual Music Award is an international competition for creative young talents in the field of new media art, film and animation looking for visionary artistic visualisations of music. Submission deadline: August 17th, 2009.
This year they will have a Visual Music live contest too. Submission deadline: May 4th, 2009.

by Pablo Valbuena

From Artintelligence: "Pablo Valbuena's Augmented Sculpture v. 1.2 is a remarkable synthesis of modernist-minimalist sculpture and video projection. One of the interesting features of Augmented Sculpture is that it possesses an elegant simplicity that belies considerable technical skill. One wonders how he managed to exactly coordinate the lines and shapes projected in the two dimensional video onto his three-dimensional geometrical sculptural 'screen'. It is a masterpiece of perspective." Thanks to Elsa Wormeck!

with Evelyn Glennie

From the Touch the Sound website: "Award-winning Director and Cinematographer, Thomas Riedelsheimer, takes us on a journey through a universe of sound with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They map a world of the senses - images and sounds. Hearing images, seeing sound. With Evelyn, we experience sound as palpable and rhythm as the basis of everything that is." Thanks to Georg Brüx.

Call for papers

Dr. Stephan Baumann, Head of Competence Center Computational Culture at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, informed me that the 2009 Sound & Music Computing Conference will have a special session on very inspirational ideas about the Visualization of Music. The deadline for a 1-pager is around June, 8th. More details here.

Everything / Everyone

It is a privilege to simply lean back and watch jigsaw pieces fall into the right place. Had the pleasure to enjoy a good meal and an inspiring conversation with Stefan Scheer tonight. A gleam of hope in the German advertising business. He talked about Matt Pyke and I later discovered that Pyke's network includes quite some people and projects that I have become interested in recently, like Maxim Zhestkov, the DVD compilation Advanced Beauty or the George Michael Stadium Visuals.

One and Giant Steps

Michal Levy, now resident in Philadelphia, US, comes from Tel Aviv, Israel: "I think once designers understand the basic tools they work with, they can better invent their own style. I always compare it to jazz. As a jazz musician I know that you learn and practise, for example, scales and harmony. That's your basic tools. Then you transcribe all the timeless solos till you know them by heart and understand the language and style other people developed before you. Only then can you find your own unique phrasing that will define who you are and what you sound like." (from Eye blog).
Make sure to watch Michal Levy's work full screen and at better quality: Go to the animation page of her website. Wonderful, and in the tradition of Visual Music godfather Oskar Fischinger. 

Len Lye and Norman McLaren

The early practitioner of experimental film Hans Richter, Walther Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling were also the grandfathers of Visual Music. They inspired the next generation who gained international reputation: amongst others Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, John Whitney and Norman McLaren. Besides the actual film experiments on DVD and also on YouTube (almost all the early experiments are online now), there are two wonderful books I'd like to recommend: The Film Work of Norman McLaren by Terence Dobson and Len Lye: A Biography by Roger Horrocks.

by Norman McLaren

The wonderful documentary "Creative Process: Norman McLaren" (1990) includes one of my favourite experimental videos in the context of Visual Music - that is "Spheres" (1969). Parts of it, alongside with a charming conversation between McLaren and Glenn Gould, who provided the music, can be watched here. Although the films wasn't shot with the concept of Bach's music in mind, Glenn Gould couldn't believe that music and images didn't grow out of one initial idea. 
Thinking about McLaren another beautiful concept that McLaren used came to my mind: The tesseract, which is to the cube, as the cube is to the square. This mathematical construct allows us e.g. to understand the difference between three and four dimensions. Would love to have one of his tesseract sculptures in the house...

A wonderful source

The "Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material." This is were I buy my DVDs. Go check it out!

Sound and visuals

If you are interested in Visual Music you will without any doubt at one point hear the name of Sebastian Oschatz. Whiz kid and genius. "Sebastian Oschatz is a German media artist and educator with a background in Computer Science. At one point he was a third of the experimental music ensemble Oval, famous for their uncompromising systems-based approach to the creation of sound. (...) Oschatz is one of the founders of the Frankfurt-based media company Meso, established in 1997 to work with experimental media interfaces and interactive installations. (...) Meso is also the developer of the visual programming tool VVVV, created originally to run Meso's own projects. (...) In general it is an excellent tool for sound-responsive visual performance." (from Generator.x) 

SIGGRAPH is soliciting works in the Visual Music genre

Here is a heads-up for a new competition in Visual Music: "SIGGRAPH is now soliciting works specifically in the Visual Music genre as part of its headlining Computer Animation Festival." All information about the call is here. Thank you, Maura! Your work is essential for my students and me!

The hero of Flight 404

Quote from eyemagazine.com: "Robert Hodgin claims not to experience synaesthesia, but his interest in the phenomenon of seeing sound as vision goes back to a fateful evening (1 November 1991) when he dropped four tabs of acid and put a Cocteau Twins boxed set on the autochanger. (This was in the days of Vaughan Oliver’s elaborate packaging design and actual vinyl clonking down on the turntable). This, as he titled his lecture, resulted in The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life. The next day, Hodgin applied to art school. He eventually studied at RISD, and a glittering career (plus lots of banner ads) ensued. And he hasn’t taken any illegal substances since."
Here are two wonderful Visual Music clips by Robert Hodgin: His visualisation of Trentemøller's sublime Miss You and another example of his work, responding to a track by Tosca.

Visual Music at its best

Had the great pleasure to work with Karl Kliem back in 2002 for the VIVA PLUS launch. I constantly show Karl's work as excellent examples for Visual Music productions to my students. His label and website Dienststelle is a wonderful resource and always an inspiration. From his site: "Karl Kliem is a founding member of Frankfurt based media lab MESO. He is developing realtime audio and video systems. Diverse works in the area of multimedia, webdesign, TV-design, music- and soundproduction for films and interactive installations. He is also a member of Involving Systems and founder of the label Dienststelle. Since 2007 he has a lectureship at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach within the faculty of Electronic Media."

by Maura McDonnell

For a massive load of information and links on Visual Music, check out the blog by Maura McDonnell. A wonderful collection to get started on the subject - and, make sure to dive deep into her archives. Totally recommended!

A definition

Quote from wikipedia.org: "Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the use of musical structures in visual imagery, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting. Visual music also refers to systems which convert music or sound directly into visual forms, such as film, video or computer graphics, by means of a mechanical instrument, an artist's interpretation, or a computer. The reverse is applicable also, literally converting images to sound by drawn objects and figures on a film's soundtrack. Filmmakers working in this latter tradition include Oskar Fischinger (Ornament Sound Experiments), Norman McLaren, and many contemporary artists. Visual music overlaps to some degree with the history of abstract film, though not all Visual music is abstract. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, Visual Music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of Visual Music."