Heike Sperling

From the series "Alphabet of Daisy" (2025) by Sarah Szczesny.

An odds ratio of about 4

Increased Prevalence of Synaesthesia in Musicians
June 17th, 2025

Via Center for Open Science: "There is convincing evidence for a relationship between synaesthesia and engagement in the visual arts, but the evidence with regards to music is sparser and mixed. For example, Rich et al. (2005) did not find that synaesthetes were more likely to be actively engaged in music as a hobby and did not report it as one of their strengths. Other studies have pointed to greater engagement in music by synaesthetes (Lunke & Meier, 2022; Ward et al., 2008), albeit with a qualification that the effect is particularly pronounced in certain synaesthetes (e.g., those synaesthetes for whom music, and other sounds, elicit visual experiences). The present study takes a somewhat different approach of investigating the prevalence of synaesthesia in musicians considering grapheme-color, sequence-space, and music tone - color. There are far fewer prevalence estimates for the latter owing to a lack of well validated methods for this type (i.e., based on an optimised cut-off between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes), and we use a recently published approach (Ward et al., 2024). In brief, we find an increased prevalence of all three kinds of synaesthesia amongst musicians. In a secondary analysis we show that synaesthesia is particularly prevalent in people who engage, at a high level (supplementing their income), in multiple creative pursuits (i.e., music + art) relative to one or none of these domains.

The fact that sequence-space synaesthesia (for days, months, and numbers) is over-represented in musicians may seem surprising given that it is not directly relevant to music. It suggests instead that there are skills and traits within most, if not all, types of synaesthesia that facilitate engagement and success in music. This has sometimes been referred to as a synaesthetic disposition (Ward, 2019) or a general synaesthetic trait (Rouw & Scholte, 2016). These differences might include greater mental imagery across multiple senses, greater attention-to-detail, and higher openness to experience. There is also evidence that heterogeneous groups of synaesthetes (not just those with sound/music inducers) perform better in tests of auditory perception such as detecting a tone in noise (Del Rio et al., 2024) and in memory for musical phrases (Mealor et al., 2020). It may still be the case that those individuals with music-color synaesthesia have important differences relative to other synaesthetes in measures that we have not been able to capture here. Previous research suggests that these music-color synaesthetes gravitate to certain music genres that are musically complex and layered (Ward et al., 2024). It may also be that they occupy different roles within a band or orchestra (e.g., leading or composing versus following), are more commercially successful, or more able to detect nuances missed by others (e.g., how a current performance differs from a previous one). The latter could be directly aided by being able to 'see' the music. These would be important measures to collect in future research.

There is a paucity of research on the prevalence of sound-color synaesthesia, but it is generally considered to be rarer than grapheme-color synaesthesia in both self-selected samples of synaesthetes (Ward & Simner, 2022) and from screening of opportunistic samples in the general population (Simner et al., 2006). Here we do not find that to be the case which requires further discussion (in non-musicians the prevalence of sound-color was 1.3% and that of grapheme-color was 0.2%). Firstly, our approach for classifying a person as having this type of synaesthesia does not rely solely on consistency but takes into account other measures (e.g., the overall palette of colors). This was necessitated by the fact that consistency is a less reliable discriminator for this type than others. Rather than a simple pass-fail, one could interpret this as different degrees of evidence for having this type of synaesthesia. Importantly, the finding of increased prevalence in musicians is robust against this. Whilst it is also conceivable that some participants are false positives (i.e., do not have synaesthesia) we minimised this by only sending the tests to participants who indicated that they had these kinds of experiences in the first place. Another possibility is that our non-musician control group are not truly representative of the general population (i.e., they contain more people engaged in music than might be expected perhaps at a hobby rather than semi-professional level).

In conclusion, we provide convincing evidence that synaesthesia, in various forms, is more prevalent amongst musicians."

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Latcho Drom (1993)

French film directed and written by Tony Gatlif
December 11th, 2023

Via Wikipedia: "The movie is about the Romani people's journey from north-west India to Spain, consisting primarily of music. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

The film contains very little dialogue and captions; only what is required to grasp the essential meaning of a song or conversation is translated. The film begins in the Thar Desert in Northern India and ends in Spain, passing through Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and France. All of the Romani portrayed are actual members of the Romani community. [...]

The use of music in the film is highly important. [...] The film relies on music to convey emotion and tell the story of the Romani. Musicians include the Romanian group Taraf de Haïdouks, La Caita (Spain), Remedios Amaya and gypsy jazz guitarist Tchavolo Schmitt.

The soundtrack was composed by Dorado Schmitt, who appears in the film."

Watch Latcho Drom (1993) in good quality without subtitles.
Watch Latcho Drom (1993) in not so good quality with subtitles.

Thanks to Sarah Szczesny!

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rand

Students in my Visual Music class acquire knowledge of design principles and techniques by producing visualisations of sound/music – e.g. as installations, videos clips, VJ sets, installations, and computer games.

Visual Music Studies 2023

Annual show of student's Visual Music projects
February 15th, 2023

Every year composer and assistant professor Marcus Schmickler and I host the Visual Music Studies at Dusseldorf's Filmwerkstatt. This year's class - María Camila Agudelo Mejía, Roberto Alessio, Nora Bögel, Benjamín Herrera Lizana, Margareta von Klenze, und Ricardo Soares Fernandes - will show their studies on February 15th, 2023.

Creating a work for this show is part of the assignment in my Visual Music class at the Institute for Music and Media at Dusseldorf Robert Schumann conservatory. Many of the students decide to show a transmedia installation, but some of them are also interested in video clips, experimental films, and animations as well as audiovisual performances.

The students are supported by an amazing team of assistant professors: Prof. Ulla Barthold, Falk Grieffenhagen, Jan Höhe, and Christian Schäfer.

 

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American Magus (2002) is a documentary by Paolo Igliori about Harry Smith (1923-1991) – compiler of a famous three-part folk album, film-maker, painter, anthropologist, obsessive collector and thinker.

American Magus (2002)

Rare documentary about Harry Smith by Paola Igliori
Febuary 21st, 2021

Via MUBI: "A documentary about the brilliant and versatile cult figure Harry Smith (1923-1991) – compiler of a famous three-part folk album, film-maker, painter, anthropologist, obsessive collector and thinker."

Via Wikipedia: "Paola Igliori (born in Rome, Italy), is a poet, writer, photographer, essayist and publisher. She became a resident of New York City from the 1980s, when she first moved there, until 2003 when she returned to her home country. [...]

In 1996, she edited and published American Magus: A Modern Alchemist, a book about then largely unknown (though well known among artists, since the 1950s) American artist, painter, poet, film maker, essayist and collector Harry Everett Smith. Igliori had developed a strong personal relationship with Smith, who, by some accounts, died in 1992 in her arms "singing as he drifted away", at the Hotel Chelsea.[3] In 2001, she wrote and directed a documentary about Smith, titled American Magus."

Thanks to Cindy Keefer at Center for Visual Music!

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"Paper Sound" by Nikolai Voinov (1930), electronic music with animation, 4K restoration.

Paper Sound by Nikolai Voinov

1930s Soviet optical synthesis animation looks positively futuristic
January 18th, 2021

Via Create Digital Media: "It’s synthesis from paper – sounds crafted quite literally by hand, using drawn animation, then optically synthesized. But after this 4K restoration, it’s clear how much these 1930s inventors were ahead of their time.

I first saw this animation, like a lot of people, via Moscow-based historian Andrey Smirnov, who writes the following description of artist Voinov for Austria’s Institut für Medienarchäologie:

'Nikolai Voinov (1900-58) began his career as an animator in 1927. In 1930 he was involved in the production of the first drawn ornamental soundtracks at Avraamov’s Multzvuk laboratory. In 1931 he left and started his own research at the Cartoon Studio of the Moscow Film Factory as a developer of ‘Paper Sound’ techniques. These were based on the synthesis of sound waves by means of paper cutouts with the carefully calculated sizes and shapes produced by his newly invented tool, the Nivotone. (Andrey Smirnov)'.

You get a full roster of paper-optical synthesis. (It’s hard to even know what to call that – it’s essentially a hybrid of optical-analog synthesis machines and traditional cell animation or other hand-drawn techniques.)

That includes:
• Variophone – Evgeny Sholpo, 1930 Leningrad / Lenfilm (who also works with the legendary Georgy Rimsky‐Korsakov
• Working directly on optical track of the film – Arseny Avraamov (who also had his own 48-tone microtonal system) – he worked across the USSR and Germany
• Paper sound techniques – Nikolai Voinov (Nivotone)
• Anushen Ter-Ghevondyan – Armenian composer and audiovisual inventor based in Yerevan at the Soviet studio there (I have fairly sketchy notes, presumably worth a separate research), also worked with paper, animation, and optical synthesis [...]

The variophone itself was tragically lost in a missile attack in the Siege of Leningrad, meaning this is another thing to blame on Nazis this week – although futuristic electronic music sometimes had the Soviet bureaucracy as a foe, too. (So it is with those who advance culture, I’m afraid, generally.)"

Thanks to Phillip Schulze !

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Anne Collier at Galerie Neu. Images courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow. Photos by Stefan Korte.

Overlooked No More: Lotte Reiniger

Animator Who Created Magic With Scissors and Paper
October 22nd, 2019

Via The New York Times: "A decade before Walt Disney Productions came into existence, making its name synonymous with animated films, there was another pioneer of the art form — Lotte Reiniger.

Reiniger’s filmmaking career spanned 60 years, during which she created more than 70 silhouette animation films, including versions of 'Cinderella,' *Puss in Boots' and 'Hansel and Gretel.' She’s perhaps best known for her 1926 silent film 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed,' a fantastical adaptation of 'The Arabian Nights' that was among the first full-length animated features ever made. [...]

Reiniger’s editing was meticulous. Starting with more than 250,000 frames, she and her crew used just over 100,000 in the film, which ran for an hour and 21 minutes, each second requiring 24 frames. It took three years to complete, and premiered in the Volksbühne, or People’s Theater, in Berlin, when Reiniger was 27. [...]

Beginning with 'Prince Achmed,' she also created an early version of the multiplane camera, which gave two-dimensional animation a hitherto unexplored depth, movement and complexity. She called her device a tricktisch, or trick table.

Reiniger described her process this way: 'Figures and backgrounds are laid out on a glass table. A strong light from underneath makes the wire hinges disappear and throws up the black figures in relief. The camera hangs above this table, looking down at the picture arranged below.'

After taking a photograph, Reiniger and her team moved the figures into their next position and photographed the scene again. 'The important thing,' she wrote, 'is to know how much to move the figures so that a lifelike effect may be obtained.' [...]

She died on June 19, 1981, in Dettenhausen, Germany. She was 82. Though The New York Times did not take note of her death at the time, the Times film critic A.O. Scott recalled her in a 2018 article about the unsung women who had advanced the art of filmmaking.

Praising Reiniger’s 'blend of whimsy and spookiness,' Mr. Scott wrote that her 'dreamy images that seem to tap right into the collective unconscious suggest both an antidote to Disney and a precursor to Tim Burton.' "

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DVD sleeve by Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles.

Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music

New DVD by the Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles
February 8th, 2018

The wonderful people at the Center for Visual Music released a new DVD with outstanding, classic and rare films by the Father of Visual Music and the great-grandfather of motion graphics.

Via the CVM: "Featuring Fischinger's famous Composition in Blue, Muratti greift ein (the waltzing cigarette ad), Study no. 8, Study no. 5 and Study no. 2 from his groundbreaking series of abstract animation synchronized to music in the 1930s, which screened in first run theatres worldwide. Plus the films Squares, An American March, Pierrette I, Coloratura, Swiss Trip (Rivers and Landscapes), newly restored animation tests from the 1920s, 30s and 40s (many never completed or released), and home movies from the 1920 and 1960s. Region free."

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Star gate

Animation by Douglas Trumbull, Music by György Ligeti

Every time I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick I can not believe that it was delivered in 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. Highly recommended.

[ Visual Music ]

Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), still from Synchromy No. 4: Escape, 1937-38

Mary Ellen Bute is the experimental artist we need right now

This Animation Pioneer Turned Music into Pure Light

Via the Creators Project: "With kaleidoscopic and surreal imagery that dances across the screen in perfect succession to its musical accompaniment, the film and animation of Mary Ellen Bute puts the viewer in an alluring dreamlike world where music is not only heard but also seen. Active from the 1930s until her death in 1983, Bute was on a continued quest to unite images and sound through her work. In this pursuit she explored many different tactics of animation and experimental filmmaking, most famously oscilloscope-generated imagery. The latter practice involves using the oscilloscope, an instrument designed to observe and track electrical signals and use information about voltage and configuration gained from this process to describe shapes. Bute began filming the images generated by music she fed through this instrument. Cindy Keefer a curator, archivist, and director for the Los Angeles based Center for Visual Music (CVM) explains, 'She then combined those images with that same music and layers of animation. Other animators began to film oscilloscopes after this, but her work makes her one of the earliest, and a pioneer in electronic art.' [...]

As the rise of the internet and emerging visual and audio technology makes the relationship between audio and visual art more analogous, it's important to look back on the pioneers whose work paved the way for these developments. Mary Ellen Bute was not the kind of person satisfied with letting her ideas remain abstract thoughts, stating in 1936, 'We need a new kinetic, visual art form - one that unites sound, color and form.' Looking at her oeuvre in hindsight, it is clear the work is a well thought out experiment in seamlessly combining these elements."

Image courtesy Center for Visual Music.

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Luminous Rainbow Wheels

Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky

Via Slate: "Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky was a 20th-century avant-garde pianist devoted to 'creating a work capable of awakening in every man the slumbering forces of cosmic consciousness,' according to his journal. To achieve this mystical ideal, he set out to create sounds that no one had ever heard before. His music was microtonal, a style that transcends the limitations of the 12-scale tuning system in traditional Western music. [...]

In the late 1940s, he translated his ultrachromatic compositions into these mesmerizing rainbow color wheels. He applied the concepts of synesthesia, blurring the line between sound and color. Each cell on these drawings corresponds to a different semitone in his complex musical sequences. If you look closely enough, you can follow the spirals as if it were a melody and listen to the scores they represent."

Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!

[ Visual Music ]

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