The Visual Music Archive has been set up by Heike Sperling. This is an excellent online resource for all that is happening in visual music and would be worth bookmarking and coming back to regularly. The layout is really easy to use and follow and this is an exciting resource, that I will definitely be keeping in touch with regularly.
Visual Music Archive
Heike makes the very interesting points about archiving practice via online means.
"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." Source: http://www.heikesperling.de/visualmusic.0.html
There are really useful categories from which to browse the archive. Latest Editions Artists Works Reading
I have only recently got round to compiling some of the books I have checked out (and would like to check out) when researching topics for visual music. There are also some great DVDs worth getting. These resources I have compiled into an amazon a store - at present it links to books on the amazon.co.uk website, but I will be also creating a similar one to link to amazon.com
These resources are not all exactly visual music resources, but they are definitely helpful in any kind of visual music investigations or research or in the broader area of audio visual composition/installation/interaction
I have signed up with Amazons affiliate programme, so every link you click from my store and then go onto purchase I get a small percentage. I am slightly monetising my blog to help pay for the time I spend putting work here, so thanks in advance if you purchase from my astore link to amazon programme.
A lecture on the art of algorithm in the moving image.
'The lecture demonstrates, by means of practical examples, the use of algorithmic relationship in the art of moving images, from films and early generative art to contemporary digital techniques...
The lecture will include the projection of films by Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, James Whitney, Larry Cuba, Dan Sandin and Granular Synthesis.'
Visual Music Survey - Ilias Bergstrom This is a really worthwhile survey to fill out - it is great to see some research being done on Visual Music and Audiences, thanks Ilias for letting me know about this survey - do fill it out - as it's a great cause - Visual Music
Some more information
In order to find out which one of two different visual music technologies audiences prefer, Ilias has created an online survey for comparing them. Please take part by filling it out.
The survey is reached using the link below, and should not take you more than 10-15 minutes to complete:
EraSer + vj Ape5 are an audiovisual and experimental project from Italy.
More on ape 5 Ape5 is active since 2001 both as a VJ and video-artist, basing his performances on the research and experimentation of real-time video, interested in the interaction between arts and video and in the experimentation of glitch aesthetisc of the sound. In 2005, he established vidauxs.net on the the first net labels that focus on real-time audio-video interaction. Lately he is into building audio-video controller that use open-source hardware See: http://www.ape5.it/
More on EraSer Matteo de Ruggieri using the pseudonym of EraSer has given birth to his own electronic experimental project through the art of circuit bending, exclusively playing with toys and musical instruments transformed by him, creating glitch and lo-fi electronic sounds on an intense melodic basis. An artist and circuit bender, he has set up circuitbend.it the first italian website based on this art, has modified toys for international musicians. See: http://myspace.com/mydataeraser
Latest Creative Project
Future sounds like past toys
It is based on the concept that contemporary music and the music of the future "sounds like" past toys.
Practice-led Visual Music Research Symposium, Bath Spa University, 19/20th Sept 2009
"Bath Spa University’s Center for Musical Research hosts an informal two-day symposium exploring a broad range of multimedia work highlighting the relationship between sound and image. Areas such as visual music, abstract cinema, experimental animation, lumia, cymatics, live audiovisual performance and relevant installation work will be examined and explored."http://seeingsound.co.uk
The excellent programme organised by Dr Joe Hyde consisted of papers/presentations, performances and screenings. The mix of screenings, talks, papers and performances made this a really rich event and a wonderful opportunity to see and hear the work that is being created now in the area of practice-led Visual Music Research and to hear in detail how this is being done across many universities and various research activities in the UK, US, Ireland, Germany. Screenings came from a mix of historical works and cutting edge contemporary work.
Having just returned from the event, it was a great opportunity to see talks and work currently being created being shown by the researcher/artist/composer at the same time. For example, several papers presented were followed by screenings and performances. The event also screened historical works and it screened a full and rich historical screening programme. Works from historical filmmakers and pioneers such as en extensive screening of Mary Ellen Bute's classic visual music films in the Mary Ellen Bute retrospective screening and an extensive screening of Oskar Fischinger's films in the Oskar Fischinger programme, were shown. The Mary Ellen Bute retrospective was also discussed in a paper by Sandra Naumann (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, Linz, Austria) – Seeing Sound: Mary Ellen Bute’s Short Films. This paper really brought forward Mary Ellen Butes historical works as a really relevant and important historical figure in the area of Visual Music. See the screenings programme at: http://www.seeingsound.co.uk/programme/screenings/
Ron Pellegrino's website has an extensive amount of resources that are of great relevance for any studies into visual music and visual music visualisers. Not only does it document his own work, but also provides links to his writings on the area of music and visual studies and writings and resources on visual music. For example some really excellent resources can be found linked from the homepage of his website - http://www.ronpellegrinoselectronicartsproductions.org/ Topics and Resources such as: Visual Music Compositional Thinking
Of interest is his recent writings and resources and a book and DVD now available.
EMERGENT MUSIC AND VISUAL MUSIC: INSIDE STUDIES - BOOK and DVD - 2009
Some new visual music resources from Ron Pellegrino that should be of interest to music visualizers:
eBay Auction Materials for a Sonic and Visual Music Synthesizer - Synthi AKS and Laser Animator
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.
Earlier Visual Music Resources
The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light - The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light by Ronald Pellegrino (c) 1983 by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc. ISBN 0-442-26499-2. The following website provides excerpts from this book.
"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 book covers the first 14 years of my research in the electronic arts - from 1967 to 1981. ... it's the first book to deal in detail with the subjects of visual music, real-time composition, and performance multimedia with electronic instruments (in the 70s and early 80s it was called intermedia or integrated media).
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."...
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."
"biothing is a research-design laboratory whose structure derives from particular linkages between various disciplinary and technological nodes, promoting intra-specific creative relationships which in turn serve as a transformative tissue for the design process itself..." http://www.biothing.org/flash.htm
"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." Source: Andrey Smirnov :: main projects at - http://asmir.theremin.ru/gsound1.htm Theremin Center Moscow State Conservatory Bolshaya Nikitskaya 13 Moscow, 125009 Russia
Excellent and really relevant resource on Visual Music authored by Hieke Sperling.
"Dr. Heike Sperling is co-chairing with Prof. Manfred Becker the post-graduate-program Motion Design at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg since 1998. She has also been teaching at the University of the Arts (HFK) Bremen, the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, Austria, and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland in Basel."
Heike's website also documents her own work and students work where she teaches visual music, it also documents talks and workshops she gives.
All screenshots link to pages of her website Website
California NanoSystems Institute, UC Santa Barbara "The AlloSphere is a unique, one-of-a-kind scientific instrument that is a culmination of 24 years of Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin's creativity and research efforts in media systems and studio design. She approached the design of the AlloSphere in much the same way that she composes a piece of music... The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. There are currently two projectors, soon to be multiple high-resolution video projectors, mounted around the seam between the two hemispheres, approaching eye-limited resolution on the inner surface. The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (around 500 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is/will be suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Other clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, effector-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments." See: http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/index.php
VIDEO EXCERPTS 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.
>>Artificial Nature/Biogenerative Art >>AlloBrain >>Multimodal Representation of >>Quantum Mechanics: The Hydrogen Atom >>Artistic Patterning and Structural Growth New Atomic Bonding: Multi-Center Hydrogen Bond. An Interactive Visualization and Multi-modal Representation of Unique Atomic Bonds for Alternative Fuel Sources
Video Excerpt from the TED conference. (Technology, Entertainment, Design) "JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the AlloSphere, a new way to see, hear and interpret scientific data. Dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements ... and detect previously unseen patterns that could lead to new discoveries." http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html
"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. The projects are developed through lab sessions, seminars and live performance according to the principles of brainstorming and mutual support, free circulation of knowledge and experimentation."
"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. The project was realized for the Mixed Media festival taking place at the Hangar Bicocca in front of the installation “Seven Heavenly Doors” of Kiefer. Seven entrances, seven tunnels, seven journeys throughout as many experience optical environments looking for the final entire and unique wholeness." http://www.otolab.net/data/projects/op7/op7-body.htm see review of Otolabs at Cimatics 2007 "the graphics were made in 3DStudio Max" Three screen performance.
audio and video: dies_ Total time: 30' otolab 2005 "The techniques: Two sources are mixed on the screen: the first one is the 3D rendering that composes the narrative plot of the main body and its deformations; the second source is given by AVS files that move geometrically following the sound input coming from a laptop where the whole sound performance is carried out live." http://www.otolab.net/data/projects/remains/remains-body.htm
I am hoping to better gather together essays and articles on visual music and visual music relevant topics in this blog. I have only recently realised that blogger provides a tag facility, and so posts can be accessed via the tags. A few such tags I wish to try to provide more posts for is the tags: essay, article, research, writing. I have come across a lot of good writing - online or otherwise, so I am probably really doing this for myself, so I can quickly get access to them again. CVM and iotaCenter based in Los Angeles, US provide really good resources and links to excellent resources. Check them out for more up to date and extensive links.
If you have a link to an excellent essay, piece of writing or resource, I would love to put it in this blog, if you could email me at mmcd@soundingvisual.com, I would be delighted to hear from you and to share the resource on this blog.
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)!
The essay is an introduction to visual music. It is definitely not definitive, but it is a start for me to articulate beyond notes. The essay has many credits from the experts who checked it over for me and to whom I am very grateful.
The New York Visual Music Marathon - 2009 program booklet can be downloaded from the Northeastern University website, the Visual Music Program Catalog - 2009 includes the visual music essay (not with all images from the print version, but with some) I wrote, but also includes the program note for the 60 or so contemporary works shown at the visual music marathon.
Visual Music Marathon: Musical Fine Art Animation Benchmark by Jean Detheux
Excellent article by Jean Detheux, May 24th, 2007 discussing the Visual Music Marathon Event held on April 28th, 2007 in Boston. 13 pages of excellent comments and discussion, with a selection of videoclips from the event online, illustrated with the article.
