Music on Image: Compositional strategies for a new art form
Jean Piché · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
From the author’s perspective, the design of video moving pictures, in both narrative and non-narrative forms, share many syntactic traits with music composition, especially electroacoustic composition. Many video art works can be experienced as a raw choreography of emotion where kinetic camera movements, color, and editing build, not a story or even perhaps a theme, but mainly a cortical experience of modernity; this is what much electroacoustic music is about. This talk will expand on key concepts of synchronicity/asynchronicity between musical and pictural materials. Examples will be drawn from the author’s recent development of ‘‘paNi IntiyA’’ in which the video editing/processing was done with a particular musical paradigm in mind, be it granulation, micro-montage, spatialization, cross-fades/morphing or electronic processing. The ultimate goal is to try and imprint onto the image the same generality as the expanded sonic vocabulary of electroacoustic composition. The author calls this form video-music. While this moniker will help to distinguish its intent from the ubiquitous music-video commodity, it more importantly indicates that the gestures, musical and visual, spring forth from the same mind as a single entity, and thus may represent a new form of mediatic expression.