Music in Vision: Visual Music Instruments in Practice

Visual music, as a contemporary artistic discipline, involves the expression of musical aesthetics in the visual medium and strives for cohesion between sound and image. Both these aspects will be considered in thaudiois chapter. After initially introducing the visual music genre, attention will then focus on techniques for expressing musical qualities in the visual medium. This is a type of cross-modal transference which is both a technical and artistic challenge. It will be demonstrated how electroacoustic music’s material qualities and theoretical concepts can guide the artist in this endeavour, specifically focussing on the structuring processes of gesture and how they can be recreated visually. Further theoretical insights into this approach are presented by considering gesture and texture from a gestalt psychology perspective. From a technical standpoint, the design and use of a series of visual music instruments (VMIs) will be explored, examining how they practically achieved material transference. In the VMIs under discussion, visual primitives comprising simple geometric forms, enhanced with feedback and noise, were used as fundamental visual building blocks. Manipulation of these permitted both gestural and textural qualities to be expressed visually and could create a cohesive quality in fixed media sound and image. For real-time application a further VMI, ‘morphlux’, was developed and used as part of biphase, a duo comprising a musician and a visualist. morphlux proved to be an effective and versatile instrument that could express both gesture and texture and had the capability to transform between these.