Tony Brooks Towards New Multisensory Spaces and Environments

Four Senses Concert, 2002

This important concert that took place in 2002 in the Dorothy Winstone Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand.  The four senses concert were a collaboration between Raewyn Turner (NZ) and Tony Brooks (UK).

website: link

"The ‘Four Senses’ 1999, 2002 concerts were to engage and reframe perception of music and to play with subjective experiences and simulated synesthesia. Each sensory element was constructed from information relating to the other elements. The associations and correspondences of the elements made by the audience was according to their own individual and personal experiences.
The investigations include perception, misinterpretation, fictional translations and the sensory worlds of the blind/deaf: of hearing, of breathing in, and of visualizing music.

Tony Brooks utilised sensors, software and projectors to create an interactive system capturing movement from the orchestra and translating it into painting with coloured light. In this way the orchestra conductor was able to “paint” the scene through his gestures within an interactive space. Similarly orchestra members, dancers and a special signing choir for the deaf images were blended into the backdrop in real-time such that their velocity of movement affected the color of image generation and collage composition.
Raewyn Turner interpreted the sound to colour and smell using the correspondences that she made between sound/silence and light/dark. The translations involved intuitive drawing, charts, measurements, referral to the seasonal time of harvest of aromatic plants, and an equation which produces a selection of plants from which to choose smell pitch.

The performances were an improvisation and a real - time translation of sound and the gestures of making that sound, into light and colour, and multiple layers of smell. The light collage thus created was a play of interaction between live video feeds and sensors, and coloured light pre-programmed to an interpretation of sound, each affecting the other in a dynamic visual loop. "

Source: Link to more information and where you can download media files

Article

Tony Brooks Towards New Multisensory Spaces and Environments [198 KB ]

Youtube Excerpt

Andrew Hill - Flux

I have been coming across Andrew Hill's name in relation to visual music quite frequently recently. An up and coming artist and researcher in the audio-visual artwork genre. Flux is quite beautiful in its sound and image relationships - ordered, synaesthetic, gorgeous.

More info on Andrew Hill

"Andrew Hill is a composer from the UK. He studied electroacoustic music and music technology at Keele and De Montfort Universities electing to focus his studies upon audio-visual composition. He is currently conducting PhD research investigating audience reception of electroacoustic audio-visual artworks with Leigh Landy and Bret Battey at De Montfort University."
Source: http://vimeo.com/andrewhill

Flux


Flux from Andrew Hill on Vimeo.

"An audiovisual piece inspired by cyclic patterns, exploring sound and image relationships."
Source: http://vimeo.com/20174827

See also: http://visualmusic.ning.com/profile/AndrewHill

Visual Music Survey - Ilias Bergstrom

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:

www.surveygizmo.com/s/204226/visual-music-1

Ilias will post all the details when the survey is closed.

See also: http://www.onar3d.com/

Ron Pellegrino - EMERGENT MUSIC AND VISUAL MUSIC: INSIDE STUDIES

NEW VISUAL MUSIC RESOURCES from Ron Pellegrino

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:

Just released on Amazon.com  and now available are 

EMERGENT MUSIC AND VISUAL MUSIC: INSIDE STUDIES

Part 1: The Book Part 2; The DVDs
a project of electronic arts pioneer, Ron Pellegrino.
To learn more about the project go to the following URL - http://www.ronpellegrinoselectronicartsproductions.org/Pages/OhNineSiteExtension/Introduction.html or copy "EMERGENT MUSIC AND VISUAL MUSIC: INSIDE STUDIES" into Amazon.com's search field.




VISUAL MUSIC SYNTHESIS SYSTEM

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."...

Source: Ron Pellegrino - Read full excerpts at:
http://www.ronpellegrinoselectronicartsproductions.org/Pages/EASL_Intro.html

Some relevant links

Visual Music Laser Images

Visual Music

Main Website for Ron Pellegrino

http://www.ronpellegrinoselectronicartsproductions.org/








Search Amazon.com for emergent visual music

Sound out of Paper - Research Project - Andrei Smirnov

"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

Heike Sperling : Visual Music Resource

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

Visual Music Essay - 2007 - Maura McDonnell

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.

DOWNLOAD: The visual music essay (without images - text only) can be downloaded here.

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. 

[Maura McDonnell - author]

INTERAKT STUDIO - Božidar Svetek

Božidar Svetek,
"a private researcher and video artist, has since 1979 been exclusively concentrating on the connection of music, painting and technics, i.e., the linking of sound and picture. With the onset of modern computer technology, he transfers such »classic« experience into a new medium. In 1996 he took out a patent for a procedure of visualizing a sound event, so that by the help of a new instrument, he »plays« the colour contents of each music work. The new instrument offers a new post-productive expressive form to music, which is accessible to every individual. What is achieved by this is a film quality that opens new concepts and aesthetic extensions united in two human immanences, in a united duration frame of time and space. All the so far accomplished promotions of the connection of technics, music and fine arts, prepared at home and abroad, have brought him several prizes and distinguished awards." (source from website - link below)
http://www.si21.com/interakt/

Splitska 6,
SI-1000 Ljubljana,
Slovenija
tel.: +386 (0) 1 283 30 24,
fax.: +386 (0) 1 283 30 24
e-Mail: interakt@si21.com

VISUAL MUSIC,
Pat. for protokol for visual ton
aplication
colorspectat