Guest Post by Ines Reingold-Tali from YOCOMA

Seeing Music

More and more tangible effort is shown up in contemporary art scene towards synthetic unification of arts, interdisciplinary new forms that blend different artistic fields into an immersive experience. Such kind of art forms are Visual Music, Music Video, Virtual Reality Art and VJ art, among others.

While listening to music, often you can find yourself dreaming – morphing visual images evolve in your mind. Some musical styles are more visually inspiring than others. In these cases we can talk about cinematic music. I guess that instrumental classical, electronica (trance, ambient etc) or more experimental tracks, could be especially effective in evoking mental imagery – non-narrative sequences of symbolic visual structures. Just close your eyes and – you can see music… That’s right!

Lights and visuals are used as projections into air and to multiple screens during most of big concert shows to impress audience. For example, electronic music wizard Jean-Michel Jarre is famous for his visually attractive giant laser shows – futuristic sound-and-light extravaganzas. He has featured also a visual music instrument – the Laser Harp, one of Jarre’s signature electronic instruments.

Jean-Michel Jarre and his Laser Harp

A synaesthetic experience of vision and sound is used to give the audience new sensations by using DJ-ing combined with VJ-ing at club evenings and raves. It is a form of Live Video Art. Like DJ-ing, it is performing art, i.e. performing visuals in synchronization to music and the manipulation of imagery in real-time. Because there is no all-in-one-unit yet, it is a lot of experimenting and improvisation. It is similar to composing music, you need a flash of inspiration to intuitively blend visuals and musical material into an impressive expression.

What is Visual Music?

“In the moving image we have a synthesis—the
spatial counterpoint of graphic art, and the temporal
counterpoint of music.”
—Serge Eisenstein

In a nutshell, Visual Music is an abstract audiovisual art form, mostly experimental in nature, where musical structures and principles are used to create a visual imagery composition. It is a synaesthetic art form, that includes music visualizations, music video, silent imagery and other artworks that blend music and visuals into immersive and captivating multi-sensory experiences. Musical abstract time and movement in time-space is captured into eye catching visual imagery – colors, shapes, lights and motion.

Historic Roots Of Visual Music

“MTV-phenomenon” has its historic roots in Color Music traditions. It seems to stretch back into ancient times, but has shown consistent development for well over two hundred fifty years.
One of the oldest known visual music instruments was Castel’s Clavecin pour les yeux (Ocular Harpsichord) in the 18th century. In the 1920s Thomas Wilfred attracted public attention with his invention – an early electrical instrument Clavilux. In the 1940s Oskar Fischinger has designed his instrument – Lumigraph.

Alexander Skriabin, a famous Russian composer, was deeply interested in synaesthesia, a truly fascinating condition in which sensations in one modality (e.g. hearing) will produce sensations in another modality (e.g. vision). He has used a specially designed instrument Fiestra per luce, keyboard of light, at the performance his symphonic poem Prometheus Moscow in 1911.

Music has been an inspiring source for some avant-garde visual artists. Abstract paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were a kind of Visual Music experiments to create paintings that would capture the musical time – movement of the painted elements.

W. Kandinsky, Composition X. Oil on canvas, 1939.

Experimentalists in the domain of Abstract Cinema like Oskar Fischinger, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, Mary Ellen Bute, among many others, have used a translation of visual image to sound or music, as images drawn or scratched onto a film’s soundtrack were converted to sound when the film is projected, and this visual material was shown simultaneously.
A wonderful masterpiece of Visual Music was Lapis (1966) by James Whitney. In this hypnotic computer animation meditative feeling was achieved by creative use of symbolic circular forms of mandala and spiral.

Lapis (1966) by James Whitney

Surfing In Mindscapes – Ideas For Electronic Musicians

Nowadays you can gig from the laptop alone. But – for creating content for your performance or audiovisual artwork you need much more … The video content may come from various sources – library footage, self made stuff, fractal art, still images, video clips… But – best solution is always originality. You need an original and impressive visual content that would complement musical material, opening up new levels and meanings.

Fruitful collaborations between electronic instrumentalists, composers and visual artist could be a key to attractively promote your music for wider audience by selling music tracks on DVD-s and online (iTunes etc) as music videos or pure ”visual music” pieces, and as well to make performances more attractive.

© Ines Reingold-Tali

Article is a guest post by Ines Reingold-Tali from www.yocoma.com . For further details and collaboration ideas visit YOCOMA or contact by email: info@yocoma.com .