Foundations of a Visual Music

animation, often called visual music, can have a structural base similar to that of absolute music. In this article, I propose a groundwork for a practical theory of visual music composition. The approach builds from the simple premise that the resolution of tension moves us through time. The article will review some fundamentals from art and design and apply them to temporal structure. To establish the idea of visual consonance, the design principle of proportion will be presented. From this, I will develop and codify the idea that it is possible to resolve visual dissonance to consonance, and so move a viewer through time in a way similar to tonal harmony in music. We will then briefly consider problems of color. The article will review some traditional approaches to color harmony and suggest a simple hierarchical approach to working with color in time. Expanding to a more comprehensive system of time-based design, the writings of Russian filmmaker Serge Eisenstein will be mined for raw material (Eisenstein 1942, 1949). Eisenstein believed that “art is always conflict” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 46). For this article, conflict is defined as the opposition of forces that motivates and shapes action. The opposed forces are dissonance/consonance or tension/ release. Eisenstein’s writings contain many ideas that are useful in the development of a theory of visual music—especially his definition of cinematic montage. From the concepts of montage and timedesign, a tentative but useable grammar for structuring time-based visual art can be developed and eventually applied to the integration of sound and image. For this article, I created some simple video examples as illustrations. Where useful, I will also refer to the works of some visual music pioneers and other filmmakers. (Pieces were selected based on relevance and availability, and the list is by no means exhaustive.) Visual Music and Its History Visual music can be defined as time-based visual imagery that establishes a temporal architecture in a way similar to absolute music. It is typically nonnarrative and non-representational (although it need not be either). Visual music can be accompanied by sound but can also be silent. One can imagine the origins of visual music going back to the discovery of fire and dancing shadows on cave walls, or perhaps reflections of clouds when first seen on the surface of rippling water. In more recent history, color organs (instruments that projected colored light) were seen by the public as early as the 18th century with Castel’s Ocular Harpsichord. In the 1920s Thomas Wilfred toured the United States and Europe performing on his Clavilux, an early electrical instrument that created clouds and streams of continuous color. This history intensified over the last century, parallel with the development of cinema. While the Hollywood-style narrative dominated (and dominates) cinema, pioneering filmmakers were working to develop a non-narrative language of light. Typically non-academics, these pioneers worked in an experimental tradition similar to that of music composers such as Eric Satie, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Among the early filmmakers were Germans Walter Ruttman, Viking Eggeling, and Hans Richter. Oskar Fischinger, also from Germany and moving later to the United States, worked over thirty years creating abstract Computer Music Journal, 29:4, pp. 11–24, Winter 2005 © 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. animations (Mowitz 2004). The career of New Zealander Len Lye, working mainly in London, spanned decades. American pioneers included John and James Whitney, Mary Ellen Butte, Stan Brakhage, and Jordan Belson. Norman McClaren, Evelyn Lambart, and their colleagues at the National Film Board of Canada also created significant works. There were many others (Russet and Starr 1976). They all struggled against financial, institutional, and technical barriers, yet they left a body of work that provides a base from which to construct a theory of visual music. This work is finding renewed interest as evidenced by recent exhibitions. The 2003 Sonic Light Festival in Amsterdam featured many of the pioneering animations, as did Sons & Lumieres, Une histoire du son dans l’art du 20 siecle at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, closing in January 2005 (Cruse 2004; see also www.sonicacts.com/03). Also in 2005, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art opened the exhibit Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, which then moved to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C. (Brougher et al. 2005). Much of this work is becoming easier to find on video and DVD at online sources such as the Iota Center (www.iotacenter.org), the Center for Visual Music (centerforvisualmusic.org), and even Amazon.com. Visual Music/Absolute Music The concept of absolute music can be constructed from Igor Stravinsky’s statement, “Music means nothing outside itself” (Stravinsky 1956). This illustrates a common mindset held by many composers for centuries. Form and content were often one in instrumental music. (This of course does not include programmatic music and especially the occasional attempts to imitate real-world sounds, such as bird calls, thunderstorms, etc.) Today, acoustic and electronic instruments can be used as generators of abstract sounds without a referent in the real world beyond the instruments themselves. These nonreferential sounds are used to create abstract temporal structures, from traditional musical forms to those of a more experimental nature. (Many of these new forms also find correspondences in visual music.) A simple definition of absolute music is the structuring of time with the materials of sound patterns (excluding again program music and literary forms such as song, opera, and theater). Stravinsky’s comment refers to music composition as the making of “art for art’s sake.” A musical work seeks from the listener an aesthetic response to the perception of sonic pattern—the appreciation of “significant form.” This was a primary focus of modernism and its formalist leanings (Bell 1914). When visual artists discuss composition, they are generally referring to static design, the formal distribution of objects in the picture plane or in threedimensional space. (This article will deal exclusively with two-dimensional space.) In the 20th century, artists sought to express design in the abstract—significant form in visual space. They began to consider seriously their work in a musical way, and the abstract form of the work was the content. Kandinsky, considered by many to be the father of abstract painting, said: A painter . . . in his longing to express his inner life cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from these results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of color, for setting color in motion. (Kandinsky 1914) Using music as a basis for visual work was a concept explored by many artists in the early 20th century. Notable is the work by Serge Eisenstein, a Russian avant-garde filmmaker who put these ideas into practice and, fortunately for us, wrote down many of his theories of cinema. These ideas still have potency and are especially relevant in discussions of visual music, time design, and the combining of sound and image.