QUBY from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.
Martin böttger, Germany has several videos on Vimeo - some of these are also installations. Excellent work and great audio visual connections. This video he created with Maya.
His Blog: tsaworks
Of his many video excerpts on vimeo, this work creeated in collaboration with Bruno Dias is wonderful - such tight 3D integration with the audio.
Tractor
TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo.
There are some really interesting vimeo channels showcasing contemporary work in the audio visual field. These channels are a great opportunity to see what is going on with audio visual work/art/music today. They also demonstrate how many different fields that audio visual works are taking place in - such as in installation settings, as interfaces, in gallery spaces, as films and animations led by music collaborations and music label collaborations - there are just so many ways now in which audio and visual are being put together...I like to still call all these approaches visual music. (Author Comment)
Experimental Motion Graphics Channel http://vimeo.com/channels/motiongraphics
Designflux
http://vimeo.com/channels/designflux "Designflux exists as a quarterly publication, bringing together interviews, reviews and portfolios of the best in contemporary motion design. This channel acts as a means to showcase work we are watching at Designflux as well as to publish special information on up and coming issues. More info at www.designflux.com"
This demonstration of an intereactive surface for VJing is excellent. The purpose of this interface is as said by Stuart Taylor on his vimeo page. "VPlay is an interactive multi-touch surface designed to open up the practice of VJing, encouraging new creative dialogues to be formed between VJs and members of the audience." http://vimeo.com/2738692
VPlay: An Interactive Surface for VJing from Stuart Taylor on Vimeo.
Some new visual music resources from Ron Pellegrino that should be of interest to music visualizers:
Also, a unique visual music synthesis system is on the auction block at eBay and will be there until Monday, May 18, 2009. To learn more the system go to the following URL - Sonic & Visual Music Synthesizer.. or go to eBay and copy "Sonic & Visual Music Synthesizer - Synthi AKS & Laser Animator" into eBays search field.
"I signed the contract to write The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light in the spring of 1977, started working on it in the fall of 1977, and finished it during the summer of 1981. During those four years I spent more than 9 months out of every year on the road giving multimedia performances in the USA and abroad, teaching music composition and technology for a year at Miami University and for three years at Texas Tech University, consulting on business electronic arts projects, founding/directing and finding funds for The Leading Edge Music Series in Lubbock, Texas, and helping to establish the long running New Music America Festivals. In other words, I was actually working on the subject material of the book and writing about it during the cracks in my schedule.
The notion of visual music, a sphere I've been exploring since the late 60s, is just beginning to pick up steam in the late 90s probably because the younger generation of artists is growing up in a multimedia world. The vast majority of older (over 30?) visual artists tend to be studio, gallery, and object oriented. They are materialists with a weak sense of the ephemeral and whatÕs involved in articulating the dynamical flow of time. Specialists in music seem to be too busy with their notes or generally disinclined to explore the sphere of visual music. Finally in the late 90s the new breed of multimedia artist is emerging, younger artists who seem to sense that today's instrument of the electronic arts, the multimedia computer, has the built-in facility for integrating the electronic arts of sound and light. The multimedia computer and a language like Java, that can function as a software multimedia synthesizer, bring us to the threshold of a visual music age."...Applying Concepts of Musical Consonance and Dissonance to Colour
An edited version of this article was published in the May 2004 edition of the journal Leonardo (Vol. 37, No. 2)
Katherine Lubar is a painter and musician who applies concepts of musical consonance and dissonance to the use of colour in her paintings. This article on colour intervals is a most comprehensive account of how she does this in her work, it is also an excellent article documenting a colour to music interval correspondence. (Author Comment)
"After comparing the colour intervals to their musical counterparts, I do feel they share something in common — the colour intervals don’t have the same character as each of the musical intervals, but both seem to follow a similar pattern in terms of which work harmoniously and which don’t. In addition, I have realized, from this research, the importance of the element of contrast to both visual and musical compositions. So while these correlations may not all work on a practical level, they can at least give us a greater understanding of colour on a more metaphorical level. The idea of correlating colour intervals to musical intervals could possibly provide a new method of examining the way colour is used in visual compositions. It is worth analysing paintings that work well colourwise, to see how their intervals relate in terms of consonance and dissonance. I would invite the reader to apply the principles outlined in this paper to such works and to use their own perception of colour to investigate these ideas further."
Preserving Visual Music - By Holly Willis - May 8, 2009 Two playlists that I add to every so often on YouTube are Visual Music and Abstract Animation. They are by no means exhaustive, but I hope to add to this more frequently. If you have any suggestions for YouTube links that I could add to these playlists, please do email me at: mmcd@soundingvisual.com I have other playlists but thought it useful to embed the more relevant ones here.
Being Irish of course, I am aware and familiar with contemporary music composition in Ireland. I hope to make more posts about music composition or things musical that could be helpful for visual music or audio visual work. Ronan Guilfoyle is one of the prominent contemporary composers working in Ireland today, he is also a Acoustic Bass Guitarist and Educator. It has always been of interest to me that Visual Music has at its core a strong consideration for music composition or a musical thinking to composition. What is it that is being explored with visuals that is so musical - one of the more important elements is rhythm - how time is handled. Ronan has written some essays on the subject of rhythm in relation of course to music composition and jazz in particular. They are available to check out on his website.(Author comment)
The essays on rhythm - some of the titles listed on his website - such as
I have just come across this most interesting installation research project to be shortly exhibited in paris. There is a lot of imagery that uses software generative processes to create "scripted" imagery - these images are always incredibly beautiful, and ordered displaying the most wonderful 'ordered' patterns that would be very hard to realise/create by hand processes. When these patterns are tied up to audio processes, then the most incredible synergy seems to take place. This project is a very physical realisation of both scripted animation and an interactive sonar field. What caught my eye was the imagery and the tight connection with sound. (Author comment)
"biot(h)ing - Invisibles is an interactive installation exhibited at the Prague Biennale and is to be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2009. ‘Invisibles' by biot(h)ing uses holosonic speakers to create sound patterns projected into an interactive space. These speakers isolate individual cones of sound, creating a counterintuitive experience for the visitors as they move through different vibrations of sonar projections. At the same time LCD Screens display streams of information as it crystallizes and becomes visible through pulses of dynamic morphologies of 3D Cells scripted in animation software. These crystallized streams may also be affected by the physical environment through an interactive sonar field. At the core of this audio/visual/physical interface is an interactie sound programming environment that alters conventional forms of musical composition through the incorporation of algorithmically based processes. The user navigates the software's internal intelligence less like a composer and more like a programmer, adjusting various parameters to indirectly influence the system's internal network dynamics. The granular synthesis of sound results form the generation of thousands of short sonic grains which are combined linearly to form large-scale audio events."
"Sound out of Paper is a research project in progress related to the technology of synthesizing sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique which was invented in Soviet Russia in 1929 as a consequence of the newly invented sound-on-film technology. At exactly the same time similar efforts were being undertaken in Germany by Rudolf Pfenninger in Munich and, somewhat later, by Oscar Fischinger in Berlin. As such the history of the Graphical Sound is an interesting cross section of 20th century history, reaching from the euphoria of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century inventors through the paradigm-smashing experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920's and 1930's to the cynical clash of ideologies of the Post-war years and finally to the dawn of the digital era in the 1970's."
Etienne De Crecy Live 2007 Transmusicales de Rennes from Clement bournat on Vimeo.
View videos on their media page illustrating work "that allows the AlloSphere Research Facility to function at both the atomic and macroscopic levels. Scroll through the video player to view incredible visualisations. Sample video excerpts from some of their projects.
Link to Satie's Gymnopodies
"onedotzero_adventures in motion is acclaimed by artists, audiences and creative industry alike for being the world leader in audio-visual arts and entertainments at the forefront of a new experiential festival experience which combines music, film, play, live performance, interactivity, digital arts and culture.
"Ryoichi Kurokawa is a japanese audiovisual artist. His works take on multiple forms such as screening works, recordings, installation and live performance. Kurokawa composes time based sculpture with digital generated materials and field recorded sources, and the minimal and the complexities coexist there. Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a unit not as separately, and constructs very exquisite and precise computer based works with the audiovisual language. That shortens mutual distance, the reciprocity and the synchronization of sound and visual composition. He also performed live-visual for musicians such as HUMAN AUDIO SPONGE(ex.YMO: Sketch Show + Ryuichi Sakamoto). In recent years, Kurokawa is invited to numerous noted international festivals and museums in Europe, US and Asia including TATE MODERN[UK], ARS ELECTRONICA[AT], transmediale[DE], Shanghai eARTS[CN], MUTEK[CA], TodaysArt[NL] and SONAR[ES] for exhibition, screening or audiovisual concert, and he continues to be an active presence on the international stage."morphing from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.
Geomtrical formes morphing into lines as they age. Cross-media explorations.The freshness of the colours against the muted background is really quite beautiful. This piece in particular creates wonderful matches with music activity. (Author comment)
"Otolab was founded in 2001 in Milan by an affinity group of musicians, djs, vjs, videoartists, videomakers, web designers, graphic designers and architects joined to go through a common path in the field of the electronic music and audiovisual research.otolab, op7 (demo) from otolab on Vimeo.
otolab 2007 --audio: sn, dies_, mud, scrub, maikko, tonylight --video: mud, dies_, xo00, peppolasagna, fd, orgone --total time (live): 50,00'
"op7 is a live audiovisual performance that develops a new way of reading the concept of the tunnel as a metaphor of the journey and the survey about the audiovisual perception, through the optical language.otolab, field from otolab on Vimeo.
audio: ssim_elotolab, remains 01-02 from otolab on Vimeo.
audio and video: dies_The video was premiered by Crash Ensemble in the Samuel Beckett theatre in 1997, which I saw and credit with my crazy but exciting path into visual music... it was an incredible work and is one my favourite multimedia music compositions - visuals and music. That particular performance was sheer magic. It was the sheer combination of energies of the singer performances, the energy and speed of the rhythm of the music and the incredible energy and appearance and disappearance of the visuals in the video projection behind the musicians, the impact of this work and the blackness of the theatre setting of the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College, Dublin left me reeling - this was one amazing performance, composition and video...and still is of course. (Author comment)
12_series - work in progress pt. 2 from Telcosystems.
"The installation is an audiovisual horizon comprised of twelve identical image and sound generating machines.
Dennis H. Miller based in Northeastern University, Boston invited me to write an essay on Visual Music for the program catalog for the Visual Music Marathon held in Boston, US in April in 2007 and then presented fully again in New York, US in April 2009. The essay was published in both catalogs. The essay was based on visual music lecture notes I had prepared for a specific set of classes I taught on Visual Music to students attending the Music and Media Technology M.Phil. course at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (I still present the visual music classes on that course). At the time, the intention of the lecture notes was to introduce students to visual music and to show them that there was plenty of historical precedents for pursuing a very close relationship between music and image. As the course has a very strong practical element to it, students have to create their own work. So the point of the lecture was to provide a context from which they could possibly place their own music and image assignments and if they choose to also pursue this in their final thesis project. The lecture I gave on visual music did have a very practical focus to it. I shared these notes with Dennis H. Miller ( and he shared excellent teaching material with me). Dennis invitation to me was to write up the lecture notes in an essay form. It was not an easy task (much much easier to jot down notes and talk - as in a teaching situation)!This is a past Visual Music event held in Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in 2008. The website documenting the Visual Music program screened is really useful as it provides an excellent overview of historical works in particular with a really useful list of their films, each filmmaker/artist is linked with a page overviewing their work and listing the films screened for the Visual Music program. The website also provides information on the curators for the event - a really useful resource on Visual Music. (Author comment)
"The cinematic genre of Visual Music draws on elements of form, colour and rhythm in music and images to create visual symphonies. Working with abstraction and figuration, gesture, pitch, beat and palette, filmmakers have explored the dynamism of sight and sound synaesthesia - hearing colour and line, seeing rhythm and tone - through innovative techniques and aesthetics. The Australian Cinémathèque’s Visual Music program includes an extraordinary range of approaches to this genre, from the Silly Symphonies, early Walt Disney musical animations, to retrospective programs of visual music pioneers, selections of rarely screened classics and contemporary works...."