Visual Music Essay - 2007 - Maura McDonnell

I am hoping to better gather together essays and articles on visual music and visual music relevant topics in this blog. I have only recently realised that blogger provides a tag facility, and so posts can be accessed via the tags. A few such tags I wish to try to provide more posts for is the tags: essay, article, research, writing. I have come across a lot of good writing - online or otherwise, so I am probably really doing this for myself, so I can quickly get access to them again. CVM and iotaCenter based in Los Angeles, US provide really good resources and links to excellent resources. Check them out for more up to date and extensive links.

If you have a link to an excellent essay, piece of writing or resource, I would love to put it in this blog, if you could email me at mmcd@soundingvisual.com, I would be delighted to hear from you and to share the resource on this blog.

Dennis H. Miller based in Northeastern University, Boston invited me to write an essay on Visual Music for the program catalog for the Visual Music Marathon held in Boston, US in April in 2007 and then presented fully again in New York, US in April 2009. The essay was published in both catalogs. The essay was based on visual music lecture notes I had prepared for a specific set of classes I taught on Visual Music to students attending the Music and Media Technology M.Phil. course at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (I still present the visual music classes on that course). At the time, the intention of the lecture notes was to introduce students to visual music and to show them that there was plenty of historical precedents for pursuing a very close relationship between music and image. As the course has a very strong practical element to it, students have to create their own work. So the point of the lecture was to provide a context from which they could possibly place their own music and image assignments and if they choose to also pursue this in their final thesis project. The lecture I gave on visual music did have a very practical focus to it. I shared these notes with Dennis H. Miller ( and he shared excellent teaching material with me). Dennis invitation to me was to write up the lecture notes in an essay form. It was not an easy task (much much easier to jot down notes and talk - as in a teaching situation)!

The essay is an introduction to visual music. It is definitely not definitive, but it is a start for me to articulate beyond notes. The essay has many credits from the experts who checked it over for me and to whom I am very grateful.

DOWNLOAD: The visual music essay (without images - text only) can be downloaded here.

The New York Visual Music Marathon - 2009 program booklet can be downloaded from the Northeastern University website, the Visual Music Program Catalog - 2009 includes the visual music essay (not with all images from the print version, but with some) I wrote, but also includes the program note for the 60 or so contemporary works shown at the visual music marathon.

[Maura McDonnell - author]

Contact - Augmented Acoustics

Felix Faire (UK), a Parametric System Designer had designed some very interesting interactive installations. One of these, Contact is an interface with which to manipulate and visualize sounds. Beautiful results. View Contact: Augmented Acoustics CONTACT: Augmented Acoustics from Felix Faire on Vimeo . "CONTACT is a tangible audio interface to manipulate and visualize sounds generated from interaction with a simple wooden surface. Any physical contact with the table generates acoustic vibrations which are manipulated and visualized LIVE as they occur using several communicating pieces of software. All code will be opensource and available on github. Bartlett School of Architecture Msc AAC Tutor: Ruairi Glynn" More information: http://www.coroflot.com/felixfaire/profile Vimeo Channel: https://vimeo.com/felixfaire

D.D. Jameson - Colour Music (1844)

D.D. Jameson devised a systematic approach to create a colour music score for a specially adapted piano. His scores took the information from a piano music score and applied it to a sound-music colour scheme and translated it into a colour score. The colour score communicated the musical information - such as notes, rhythm, durations. His score was to link to a special adaptation of a piano music instrument that would have the keys prepared with the relevant colours. The musician could then play the piano by following the colour music score. Not only were the piano keys to be coloured according to his colour to tone analogy system but the score was to also communicate other aspects of the musicianship such as: the intervals of the music, the notes and their octaves, by mapping the height of the colour to the octave of the note and the width of the colour to the duration of the note. "A pianoforte having been prepared in the manner described, any air may be slo...

International Call for Works - VISUAL MUSIC FESTIVAL

I am very happy to announce the call for works for visual music films for a visual music festival devoted to contemporary practice to be held at the University of Kentucky, US. Why I am very proud is one of my former students is involved in organising this, well done Kristine SCFA Visual Music Festival 2025 @ The University of Kentucky Call for visual music films, Deadline is 15th December 2024 General Rules: • The films must be made entirely with abstract imagery, avoiding representation. That is: no cars, no people, no landscapes, no texts, etc. • You can use any technique you’d like: drawing, video composition, cgi, scratch, op-art, stop-motion, camera-less… • The soundtrack cannot feature any words, in any language. If you’re using a song, this must be instrumental or feature non-narrative voices, (no lyrics). • Maximum running time is 8 minutes. • Open and/or closing credits are welcome. • Films must have been produced after 2017. • We kindly request authors to enter their fi...

Visual Music

Search This Blog