Singing light: creating affective visual music
Julie Watkins · 2018
This paper will discuss my on-going practice-based research into composing visual music pieces, citing works from the visual music canon and my own practice. The aim is to create a framework for composing ‘abstracted’ visual music that is informed by, but not a re-making of, previous visual music. As a visual musician, I face the challenge of retaining my own artistic impetus, amidst an overwhelming choice of instruments, aesthetics, practice, techniques and technologies. This paper will examine navigating the ephemerality of artistic technology by utilizing strategies similar to composer Ron Kuivila’s; such as “under”, “over” and “into” and compositional methods such as Paul Klee’s use of ‘individual’ and ‘dividual’. Visual music can be perceived as overly repetitive, cold and alienating if it seems to embody a mechanical alignment of music to image, or if it seems disengaged from human emotions. A key objective is to create work that is non-narrative, ‘abstracted’, and yet suffused with human presence and emotion. To that end, wordlessly sung music is fused with ‘abstracted’ animation through composing motion, sound temporalizing images, sound and space and sense of identity embedded in the human voice. Given the rapid development of AI within music and animation it is timely to develop methodologies for creating pieces that afford a “soft fascination”.