Visual Music Assistant

The Visual Music Assistant system provides an augmented reality experience via Microsoft\u27s HoloLens device. The application we will develop will provide an intuitive user interface to learn how to play on a keyboard (88-key piano)

An investigation into composing visual music today

This paper will discuss an ongoing investigation into developing methodologies for composing new abstract visual music pieces. This practice-based research is historicised in relation to seminal artists whose works have helped to form the canon of visual music and composers, theorists and scientists whose work touches on the same problematic domain. This investigation highlights both the key seminal influences underpinning the new work and the innovations embodied within it. The methodologies developed through creating several visual music pieces over three years are carefully delineated, affording insights into key intersections of abstract visual music, the idea of synesthesia, and creating art that is less about the self and more about a shared experience

Composing Visual Music: visual music practice at the intersection of technology, audio-visual rhythms and human traces

Creators of visual music face the challenge of retaining their own artistic impetus amidst an overwhelming choice of instruments, aesthetics, practice, techniques and technologies brought about by the impinging presence of a vast sea of data and tools. Navigating the data-driven ephemerality of artistic technology and its market-driven constraints by utilising strategies similar to composer Ron Kuivila’s (1998) for getting ‘under’, ‘over’ and ‘into’ will be examined with the aim of elucidating methodologies for creating works that other artistic practitioners may find useful. Leading pioneers of visual music were, of necessity, innovators of technology as well as visual musicians and artists. There is an intrinsic tension between developing new technology in order to re-imagine how music can be made visible and technological pioneers succumbing to the fascination of exploring the technology itself. Understanding aspects of perception, such as rhythm, is key to developing new technologies and processes in ways that avoid this pitfall and keep the experience of visual music central. Audio-visual synchronisation and rhythm are vital to create, in the seminal computer artist John Whitney’s words: ‘an art that should look like music sounds’ (1980: front dust jacket). Integrating the body, human traces and especially the human voice into visual music compositions underpins the key objective which is to create work that is non-narrative, ‘abstracted animation’[1] (Watkins, 2015), and yet suffused with human presence and emotion. Visual music can be perceived as overly repetitive, cold and alienating if it seems to embody a purely mechanical alignment of music to image, or if it seems disengaged from both human emotions and natural imagery. This paper is part of an on-going investigation into developing methodologies for composing new abstract visual music pieces and, ultimately, parameters for a visual musical instrument

Interpreting Electroacoustic Audio-visual Music

The basis of this research project stems from reflections upon the process of composition for electroacoustic audio-visual music. These are fixed media works in which sound and image materials are accessed, generated, explored and configured in creation of a musically informed audio-visual expression. Within the process of composition, the composer must decide how to effectively draw relationships between these time based media and their various abstract and mimetic materials. This process usually has no codified laws or structures and results in relationships that are singular to the individual artworks. The composer uses their own experience and intuition in assessing how best to associate sounds and images and they will use their own interpretation of the materials to evaluate the how successful they are in realising their intentions. But what is there to say that the interpretation made by the composer bears any resemblance to interpretations made by audiences? The current research sought to assess any trends or commonalities in how people interpret such works. Utilising a combination of empirical research, composition and scholarly study, the project investigated various theoretical approaches to interpretation and the occurrence of correlation between compositional intention and audience interpretation. Models from different theoretical disciplines were combined in order to build up a picture of the processes involved in making interpretations, and to aid in the rationalisation of empirical data. The application of three methodological approaches allowed for the topic to be considered from a diversity of perspectives, and for triangulation to take place in confirmation of the research outcomes. The way in which individuals build up interpretations from non-codified abstract and mimetic materials also provided a suitable case study for the critique and assessment of various theoretical approaches to interpretation. The project challenges structuralist approaches to interpretation, drawing together theoretical materials and empirical research findings in support of a post-structrualist model of interpretation that demonstrates the absolutely vital role played by context – the framing of the artwork in the consciousness of the individual audience member

A Circular Planetarium as a Spatial Visual Musical Instrument

Planetariums have been home to spatial visual music for over sixty years. Advanced technology in spatial sound such as sound field and wave field systems are superseding channel-based systems as areas for research. Nevertheless, there is room for invention in immersive spatial visual music in a channel-based planetarium. Circular seating minimizes problems with sonic reflections from circular walls suffered by unidirectional theatre seating arrangements. Circular seating supports dynamic permutation of channel-to-speaker routing as a corrective and compositional measure. Full dome projection of visuals gives inherent support for graphics-to-music spatial correlation and related immersive effects. This paper is a case study of the aural architecture of one small circular planetarium and the visual music composition and performance approaches that it supports

Consonance and Dissonance in Visual Music

The concepts of consonance and dissonance broadly understood can provide structural models for creators of visual music. The application of words such as \u27harmony\u27 across both music and visual arts indicated potential correspondences not just between sensory elements such as pitch and colour but also with the manipulation of tension and resolution, anticipation and stability in visual music. Concepts of harmony have a long history in proportions of space, colour and motion as well as music that artists can now exploit with new technologies. I will offer examples from my own work as well as techniques from artists such as Oskar Fischinger and John Whitney

Correspondences and Complementarity in Visual Music

Visual music is an art form that implies intermodal connections between the senses but which has historically often failed to identify aesthetically satisfying correspondences. Artistic success does not automatically emerge in one medium when its elemental characteristics are mapped to those of an existing work from another medium. I offer examples from my own abstract animations with music, which draw upon John Whitney\u27s concept of complementarity, a more intuitive correspondence at a higher level of aesthetic qualities, that of stasis and dynamism or tension and resolution

Interactive visual music

How can Visual Music be composed and presented in such an engaging way that it will turn spectators into participants? How to connect a youthful, twenty-first century audience who are keen to update their Instagram story with Visual Music? Visual Music is an art form, which is “an equal and meaningful synthesis of the visible and audible” (Lund & Lund 2009 149) and “is typically non-narrative and non-representational” (Evans 2005 11). Visual Music is often presented as cinema. Cinema audiences are generally considered to be passive spectators, whose “reactions are pre-programmed by the director, crew, cast and writer” (Mackintosh 2003 2). This paper highlights the nexus between, to use McCall’s (2004) terms ‘the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial’, with a focus on creating interactive Visual Music installations