Visual Music

So I know the rest of the blogs have focused on Light lately, but I wanted to bring up the issue of sound also, especially after last seminar's screening of visual music, and the very term its self is intresting.

Visual music is also refered to as color music, but mainly it is defined as a system which translates music or sound into a visual representation using many mediums like CG, Video and animation and so on.

Color music is an old tradition of creating devices such as lumas that display colors and lights similar to the structure of how music is constructed in a way.

This is real interesting becuase I've studied music long before I ever studied animatin and in a sense I have to say it was hard for me to see the association between how light/color functioned in these films we saw and its relation to music.

The first instinct is to want to see the visuals directly describe the music heard and in almost all the films we saw I would say that was not the case, especially in the more fluid and abstract animations such as Richard Bailey's work. I found that either the visuals were so over powering and almost hard to discribe using the music that they chose,it almost seemed like a seperate accompaniment, or the other case of were the music was great and sadly the visuals did not hold up to it.

The way in which i see those pieces described in similar ways to music is their structure. They remind me of sonatas, which are large scale musical pieces that have typically three to four movements. The different movements describe the same theme differently and it seems to be this way in the visual music. The light is the occuring motif and it goes through several transformations, it crescendoes where we see the visuals becomes more intricate and climax in a similar way. It goes through different paces much like the different movements in sonatas, where every piece has its pace.

Some of the pieces remind me of more modern and contemporary music were syncopation became more popular and we see that in the juxtapositions of visuals and even its contrast against the music alot of time.

I can definitly see how these pieces relate a bit more to the structure of music than say the rigid and more formuliac structure of script and story writing. I still think that to some degree they are not as effective as I would like them to be. I think the disjunction between the visuals and the music that goes with it takes alot away.

I think the work of Oskar Fischinger and Norman Mclaren are much more succesful at infusing both mediums together. One of the beautifies of animation is its ability to manipulate time and control every aspect of it and they use that so beautiful and insync with the beats of the music that they choose. Even the simple shapes and elements they use visually portray the notes that are heard.