VISUALISINGMUSIC

Synesthesia• Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia,

- from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation"

• harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men.

• People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.

• Imagine what it would be like to taste a triangle, to hear the colour red or to see sound.

Estimates for the number of people with synesthesia range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 100,000. There are probably many people who have the condition but do not realise what it is.

• "The painting represents the opening of the concerto for four violins. I listen to the music while I paint. First, the music gives me an optimistic, happy feeling and I perceive red, yellow, and orange colors in a great variety with little contrast. It looks like a field of these colors. I perceive the color field as a musical chord. You can compare it with the colors of a blanket or cover made of autumn leaves."

Anne Salz, a Dutch musician and visual artist, perceives music in coloured patterns. She describes her painting inspired by Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins:

• "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white."

• "Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings."

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

• The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by "a studious blind man" claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet.

• The idea that music is linked to visual art goes back to ancient Greece, when Plato first talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. The spectrum of colours, like the language of musical notation, has long been arranged in stepped scales.

• it is still unclear whether or not Beethoven, who called B minor the black key and D major the orange key, or Schubert, who saw E minor as "a maiden robed in white with a rose-red bow on her chest", were real synaesthetes.

The Colour OrganThe term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical (18th century), then electromechanical, devices built to represent sound or to accompany music in a visual medium—by any number of means.

In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed.

In the 60s and 70s, the term 'color organ' became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows.

The term 'light organ' is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing 'color organ' to reassume its original meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_organ

Musical Paintings

• In the second half the nineteenth century, a tradition of musical paintings began to appear that influenced symbolist painters.

• In the first decades of the twentieth century, a German artist group called The Blue Rider (Der blaue Reiter) executed synesthetic experiments that involved a composite group of painters, composers, dancers and theater producers. The aims of the group were focused on three goals: the unification of the arts by means of Total Works of Art.

• Kandinsky's theory of synesthesia, as formulated in booklet On the Spiritual in Art (1910), helped to shape the ground for these experiments. He described synesthesia as a phenomenon of transposition of experience from one sense modality to another, as in unisonous musical tones.

Kandinsky was not the only artist at this time with an interest in synesthetic perception. A study of the art at the turn of the century reveals in the work of almost every progressive or avant-garde artist an interest in the correspondences of music and visual art. Modern artists experimented with multi-sensory perception like the simultaneous perception of movement in music and film

Automatic Drawing

• Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper.

• In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed.

• Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by some Spiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing whilst physically taking control of the medium's body.

• Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson. Artists who practised automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting (as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings). Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s.

Kadinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) was a Russian

painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-

century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract

works.

•Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia, In his case,

colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical

notes and vice versa.

•Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them, musical notes and chords that would visually "sing" together. blue or a silent, black void.

•He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well.

“It is clear that all I have said of these colours is very provisional and general, and so also are those feelings (joy, grief, etc) which have been quoted as parallels of the colours. For these feelings are only the material expressions of the soul. Shades of colour, like those of sound, are of a much finer texture and awake in the soul emotions to fine to be expressed in words.” (Kandinsky concerning the spiritual in art. P 41)

• Charles BaudelaireThe influential French poet and chronicler of modern life displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet "Correspondances": "Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other." In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city. He also experimented with hashish in order to enhance the intermingling of the senses. Baudelaire's countryman and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud had synaesthesia, too.

• Vladimir NabokovThe Russian author famed for his English novel of 1955 Lolita, developed his "freakish gift" of synaesthesia during childhood when he complained to his mother that the colours on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong". Synaesthesia is now recognised as a genetically inherited trait, and the Nabokov family was full of synaesthetes; his mother, wife and son Dimitri all had the condition. "The confessions of a synaesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings," wrote Nabokov.

• Olivier MessiaenThe acclaimed French composer and organist claimed that his complex chords and rhythms came to him in "coloured dreams" in which he saw blue, red and green spirals moving and turning with the sounds. "When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colours which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality." He composed many synaesthetic works such as Chronochromie-Strophe I (1960), and was also heavily influenced by birdsong.

• David HockneyHockney's stage sets for performances of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Mozart's Magic Flute and Erik Satie's Parade were, he claimed, created simply by listening to the music as colour and shape: "When I listened to the music, the tree just painted itself." He is also interested in all kinds of optical phenomena in art, from photography to the use of mirrors and lenses by Old Master painters.

• Filippo Tommaso MarinettiThe Italian artist and author of the inflammatory Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (and the lesser-known Futurist Cookery of 1932) conceived of a tactile dinner party in which guests would wear pyjamas of sponge, cork and sandpaper while eating food without use of their hands. He played a series of "intoning" instruments that whispered, screeched, whistled and crashed at a series of London concerts in 1914 with Luigi Russolo, who advocated his own manifesto on "The Art of Noises". Marinetti also believed that fingertips, knees and elbows could see.

Graphic Scores• Musical graphic notation is a form of music notation which refers to

the use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music. It is used for experimental music, which in many cases is difficult to notate using standard notation.

• Graphic notation can come in various forms:

• Graphic scores, in which the music is represented using symbols and illustrations:

• Piano Roll Notation, borrowed in the early 1950's and 1960's from piano rolls used for player pianos in the turn of the 20th century, this notation is now popular in computer MIDI sequencers to create music.

• Line staves showing relative pitch, with the actual pitches being decided upon performance.

Graphic symbols• A more common aspect of graphic notation is the use of symbols to convey information to the

performer about the way the piece is to be performed. These symbols first began to appear in the works of avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Krzysztof Penderecki as well as the works of experimental composers such as John Cage and Earle Brown during the 1950s and 60s. Although this concept was closely related to the development of fully graphical notation, it is essentially different in that the symbols are intended to convey a concrete sonic result, whereas true graphic scores are often intentionally ambiguous, leading to many possible interpretations of the score.

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ONLINE COLLECTION OF GRAPHIC SCORES

http://nyme.org/graphic.html