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What is visual music?

Abstract visualizations, or “visual music”—generative patterns and audio responsive graphics that have a direct symbiotic relationship between image and sound—can evoke a sense of space, environment, rhythm and illuminate concepts in performance without representational imagery.

In a live context of improvised music and improvised visuals, abstract visualization allows music and image to be partners in the creation of an aesthetically meaningful shared experience.

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Visual Music and Synesthesia

Visual music is an art form in part inspired by and in some cases driven by synaesthesia — the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.

One of the more common cases of synaesthesia is an association between sounds and color.

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Synesthesia

Violinist Kaitlyn Hova (Remix of "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service)

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What is the color of a sound / tone?

The synaesthetic relationship between sound and vision continues to be explored by scientists artists working today.

“Color scales,” dating back to Isaac Newton, attempt to scientifically correlate musical scales with colors. ”Color Organs,” instruments that generate colors based on notes, date back to the 1850s and continue to be developed.

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Color / Tones

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Color Scales

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Qualities of Sounds

AMPLITUDE: The volume or magnitude of a signal.
PITCH: The fundamental frequency of a signal.
RANGE: The distance between the lowest and highest pitch in a composition of sequence.
TEMPO: The rate of speed at which a musical composition is performed.
HARMONICITY: The relationship between a signal's fundamental frequency and its series of overtones.
REVERB: Prolongation of a sound caused by its repeated reflection off various surfaces in a space.
TIMBRE: The quality of a musical tone that distinguishes voices and instruments.
RHYTHM: The variation of durations of sounds over time. Beat, meter, etc.
ENVELOPE: Changes in volume over time. Attack decay sustain release.

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Translations between sounds and imagery

Color scales are only one example of how to translate sound tones to images. Some other ideas to explore include:

Overtone to Hue
Overtone / Pitch to Line Quality
Volume to Saturation / Brightness
Pitch to Shape Scale
Pitch to Hue
Tempo to Color Saturation
Tempo to Shape Quality

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Translations between sounds and imagery

Volume to Saturation / Brightness

“As a rule, pure florescent colors are loud. Muted, that is, broken colors, with a high proportion of black and white, are soft. In other words we have a correspondence between...amplitude and...purity.”

Karl Gerstner, The Forms of Color, 1986, 173

Overtone / Pitch to Line Quality

“Most musical instruments have a linear character. The pitch of the different instruments corresponds to the breadth of a line: violin, flute, and piccolo produce a very thin line, viola and clarinet a somewhat thicker one; and by way of the lower instruments, one arrives at broader and broader lines, right down to the lowest notes of double bass or tuba.”

Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 1926, 617-18

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Wassily Kandinksy

Wassily Kandinksy, one of the founders of non-objective painting, went so far as to create a color code for sounds. He intended for his pieces to be both seen and heard, titling them as “compositions.”

In Grey (1919)

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