Media archaeology-based Visual Music

This article describes the intersection of Media Archaeology and Visual Music in my artistic practice that repurposes obsolete devices to investigate new connections between light and sound. I revive and hack tools from our analogue past: oscilloscopes, early game consoles, and lasers. I am attracted to their aesthetic difference from the ubiquitous digital projections: fluid beam movement, vibrant light, infinite resolution, absence of frame rate, and line-based image. The premise behind all my work is the synthesis of both image and sound from the same signal. This strong connection envelopes the audience in synchronous audiovisual information that reveals underlying geometric properties of sound. In this text I describe the practice and the aesthetic potentials connected to few analog and digital hybridized systems to generate new sonic and visual experiences.

Application of the Theory of Brainstorming in Visual Teaching of Music

Visual teaching is a teaching method or teaching tool that presents a clearer and more intuitive image of music works to students. Drawing on the theory of brainstorming, this paper explores the application of brainstorming, a brain stimulation method, in visual teaching of music. The main results are as follows: visual music teaching mainly improves music skills, cultivates music aesthetics, and enhances communicative competence. Once introduced to music class, the creative thinking method of brainstorming enables the teacher to train the divergent and creative thinking of students. During music teaching, brainstorming stimulates the learning interest, boosts the learning confidence, and cultivates the independent thinking of students. The research findings lay a theoretical basis for music course reform.

Monumentos Virtuais: projeto audiovisual colaborativo para formato fulldome

This article presents the “Virtual Monuments” project that explores alternative modes of video production and projection, investigating other media, formats and practices. Our fulldome project is a collaborative interdisciplinary project jointly produced by the Federal University of Santa Maria/Labinter (Santa Maria, Brazil), Durban University of Technology/ Interdisciplinary Lab (Durban, South Africa) and the Federal University of Ceará (Fortaleza, Brazil). The aim of this project is to use the planetariums or different surfaces in these cities as sites for the projection of digital monuments collaboratively produced and shared between the three participating cities. Monuments are usually considered structures that occupy public spaces as cultural symbols commemorating important figures, events or elements of a culture´s heritage. Monuments can also be seen as sites where power can either be enforced or contested. The Virtual Monuments project was produced jointly as an experiment in multi-sited, collaborative, interdisciplinary creation between the three participating institutions in order to expand our understanding of the dynamic collaborative processes of ideation, creation, production, participation exhibition and reception. Each site contributed and participated in the creation of the others’ artworks, each one sharing their creativity and know-how to collectively realize these monuments as a tentative siting of dissolution of hierarchies and power structures within institutional creative environments. The project has been showcased in international events such as “Understanding Visual Music - UVM” at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium of Buenos Aires, “DIGIFEST” at Durban University of Technology, and “EFEMERA” at the UFSM Planetarium in Brasil.

“Hyperwiper”: Dancing windshield wipers Synchronizing Windshield Wipers with Sound Entertainment System Inside Vehicles

Instead of adding to the driving cacophony, actively orchestrated windshield wipers can enhance musical audition, reinforcing a beat by augmenting the rhythm, increasing the signal:noise ratio by aligning the cross-modal rhythmic beats and masking the noise, providing “visual music,” the dance of the wipers. We recast the windshield wipers of an automobile with advanced multimedia technology, allowing wipers to dance to music.

Rhetoric, Music and Philosophy in 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein by David Clark: Intermedial and Intertextual Practices

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to Be Played with the Left Hand) (2008) by Canadian artist David Clark is a web-based Flash creation that explores the life and works of Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title suggests the digital work should be “played with the left hand”, this means that there are additional semiotic units (e.g. videos, sounds, images, linguistic texts) hidden in the metaphysical strings of the constellations that the reader can add to the narrative by means of interaction and manipulation. We argue that by discovering unexplored paths and creative unknowns the reader encounters examples of gestural melodic manipulation that will consequently lead to the creation of visual music. The visual music produced by the secret of the Left Hand, whose notes (piano keys) are the gestural enunciation of different discourses and diverse thematic, expose the potential intermedial literary characteristics of the text. Our analytical approach will demonstrate how rhetoric and digital technologies join to visually express philosophical concepts.

Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Exploring the Nexus of Holography and Holophony in Visual Music Composition

In this article the author explores the idea that, owing to their shared three-dimensional nature, holophons and virtual holograms are well suited as mediums for visual music composition. This union is ripe with creative opportunity and fraught with challenges in the areas of aesthetics and technical implementation. Squarely situated upon the bleeding edge of phenomenological research and creative practice, this novel medium is within reach. Here, one methodological pipeline is delineated that employs the convergence of holophony, virtual holography and supercomputing toward the creation of visual music compositions intended for head-mounted displays or large-scale 3D/360-degree projection screens and high-density loudspeaker arrays.