From Sonic Art to Visual Music: Divergences, convergences, intersections

Abstract

This paper introduces strategies for the electroacoustic community to relate to, and engage with, the visual music phenomenon. It addresses technological, historical, cultural and idiomatic intersections between the two art forms. From the personal viewpoint of a trained synaesthete of acousmatic origin, the boundaries between sonic and audiovisual compositional practices appear somewhat porous. The electroacoustic language is intrinsically visual, even within its acousmatic paradigm. Visible morphologies acquire a sonorous dimension as soon as we uproot them from their cinematographic habitat and plunge them into the cauldron of a new alchemy. Multi-disciplinary lines of enquiry are essential to elucidate the workings of complex multimediatic interactions such as those at play in visual music. Yet, a holistic view of the creative and technological pathways is equally significant so that artistic truths, and myths, can be (re)discovered amidst lines of code or loops of wire connecting our computer peripherals. Thus this article is written both with the language of an analyst and, perhaps more, with the expressions and idiosyncrasies of an academic composer. A few selected examples from the contemporary repertoire are discussed to exemplify a variety of approaches to visual music composition, including extracts from the work Patah (Garro 2010).

Perceptive vs reflective: spectator interpretation of multimodal artworks

“…The composition of the music for this study was greatly influenced by the paradigms of a genre known as visual music. The term 'visual music' was originally coined to describe the temporal aspects, or temporality, of abstract artworks in the early twentieth century [5,35]. These were artworks where the contents of the artwork, such as shapes, colours, and their relations to one another, were designed to incrementally reveal themselves to the spectator as they scanned over and journeyed through the work.…”

“…Many investigations have been performed to explore the way in which visual and auditory interaction combine, both in artistic ventures and in academic studies. For instance, contributions from the arts aimed to explore human-world connection by focusing on the utilisation of moving or videographic imagery, though tended to disregard the combination of static visual artworks and music for artistic purposes [5,6]. Academic studies, on the other hand, have been undertaken to understand the mutual effect that sounds and visuals have on each B Oliver Bramah obra335@aucklanduni.ac.nz Sue Adams s.adams@auckland.ac.nz Fabio Morreale f.morreale@auckland.ac.nz 1 Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland), Aotearoa, New Zealand other, including static [7] and moving visuals [8].…”

Music – Bodies – Machines

“…Andrew Hill (2013) proposed various interpretations of what he termed 'electroacoustic audio-visual music' in the context of his doctoral research on audience reception. Diego Garro (2012) notes the term Visual Music has a hybrid provenance as it was used in 1912 by artist and art critic Roger Fry to describe Kandinsky's abstract paintings. He further notes that the term could have been used to draw attention to a shift in focus from the figurative to the obscure.…”

Dead Logics and Worlds: Sound art and sonorous objects

“…Like metaphors, the sound objects re-emerge as materials for composition but their meanings and logics have been reworked into new narrative ensembles and new compositions and arrangements (Garro 2012: 110). In relation to Shaw’s Sound and Seclusion , the spatio-temporal origin of the materials that are reworked is a dead, pre-compositional world in which the compositional and performative use of those collected materials continues.…”