Optical Research: A Curated Visual Music Collection

Optical Research is a curated collection of visual music by a group of 12 international artists, which has recently been presented as a DVD, a gallery installation, and will be presented at the British Computer Society Electronic Visualisation and the Arts: EVA London 2015. ‘Visual music’ describes a form of filmmaking in which animated visual images of a typically abstract nature are arranged into music-like structures (Brougher & Mattis, 2005). While the origins of visual music lie in the early colour organ inventions or the paintings of artists such as Kandinsky, ‘visual music’ as a form of experimental film-making in the mid 20th Century was pioneered by artists such as John Whitney, Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson and others. John Whitney sought to provide a form of ‘visual harmony’ that mirrored that provided within music (Whitney, 1981). Jordan Belson’s work explores similar approaches, but was particularly concerned with the use of abstract visuals in order to reflect music of the ‘inner eye’, which related aspects of internal experience. Perhaps the most well known example of visual music however is Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which uses animated cartoon narratives to reflect well-known orchestral pieces of music.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Jonathan Weinel

Conference

Publication date: July 2015

Publication date (Print): July 2015

Pages: 371-372

Affiliations

[0001]Glyndŵr University

Plas Coch Campus, Mold Road

Wrexham, LL112AW, North Wales, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/eva2015.82

SO-VID: 33ac878c-a08f-451c-9ed3-14d04ca78a98

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2015)

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 7 & 9 July 2015

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/eva2015.82

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

K BrougherO Mattis 2005 Visual Music: Synesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 Thames & Hudson
T Leary 1994 Chaos and Cyberculture Ronin Publishing
W. C Wees 1992 Making Films for the Inner Eye: Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Paul Sharits Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-garde Film University of California Press
J WeinelS CunninghamR PickingL Williams 2014 Holophonor: On the Future Technology of Visual Music.K Curran Recent Advances in Ambient Intelligence and Context Aware Computing IGI Publishing
J Whitney 1981 Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art McGraw-Hill Inc

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] K BrougherO Mattis 2005 Visual Music: Synesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 Thames & Hudson

[2] T Leary 1994 Chaos and Cyberculture Ronin Publishing

[3] W. C Wees 1992 Making Films for the Inner Eye: Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Paul Sharits Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-garde Film University of California Press

[4] J WeinelS CunninghamR PickingL Williams 2014 Holophonor: On the Future Technology of Visual Music.K Curran Recent Advances in Ambient Intelligence and Context Aware Computing IGI Publishing

[5] J Whitney 1981 Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art McGraw-Hill Inc

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