Week 02 | Visual Music, Audio Analysis

Tuesday, March 8, 2022 #

Visual Music & Experimental Animation on Film #

Today we are going to jump ahead in time from Magic Lanterns to the 1920s and 1930s. This is a time period when many artists were experimenting with the newly invented media of film and animation.

Avant-Garde Animation & Visual Music #

Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia. – Wikipedia: Visual Music

Hans Richter - Rhytmus 21 (1921) #

Hans Richter - On Film and Early Works #

Click here if the embed does not work

Evgeny Sholpo - The Variophone (1930) #

Nikolai Voinov – Paper Sound (1932) #

Nikolai Voinov - Prelude by Rachmaninov (1932) #

Oskar Fischinger – Ornament Sound Experiments #

László Moholy-Nagy: ABC in Sound / Tönendes ABC (1933) #

Oskar Fischinger - An Optical Poem (1938) #

Learn More #

Tools and Techniques | Audio Analysis in TouchDesigner #

This series of videos goes through lots of details about audio analysis in TouchDesigner. I made some mistakes and the videos became longer than I was hoping, so I might re-record them at some point. But for now, follow along with the mistakes and how to fix them.

I will list all of the videos in the series here, but you should only watch the first video before tomorrow’s class. The rest before next week.