Kinetic colour sound
Wednesday, 24 May 2006
Whitney Music Box – Coverpop (jbum)
It seems as if a revolution of sound-image based synaesthesia is now truly underway. From software based approaches using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis of music and sound to drive visuals (VVVV & Proce55ing) to the manual synchronisation of the musical beat and the video frame in Vj’ing and experimental film.
Early Pioneers of experimental film and animation where just as interested in the symbiosis of tone and hue. The widely appreciated work of Oskar Fischinger is known particularly for its synchronisation of sound and image. Around 1950 Fischinger devised his ‘colour organ’ named the Lumigraph a machine played both sounds and lights and serving as an instrument for one-man shows.
Another pioneer interested in the relationship between image and sound is John Whitney. In his is classic work, Digital Harmony – On The Complementarity of Music and Visual Art, Whitney explores what he calls ‘harmonic resonance’ in animation, where different parts of an animation are given different fixed parameters (of say speed and/or direction) to produce subtle patterns. He referenced this further to musical harmony and laid down the groundwork for some specific methods for producing what he called ‘visual music’.
Coverpop’s ‘Whitney Music Box’ is a successful attempt at realising Whitney’s ideas. Coloured dots revolve in circles a periodically, and like a music box, when each dot reaches a specific point it’s associated note is sounded resulting in a kaleidoscopic composition composed entirely by numbers.