The language of visual music: An historical re-evaluation of the visual music canon in search of the origins of correlations between sound and vision.

The language of visual music: An historical re-evaluation of the visual music canon in search of the origins of correlations between sound and vision.

• What can we learn by an exhaustive investigation into the history and evolution of visual music in terms of grounding our understanding within the historical animated films, experiments and examples of the pioneers that made them?
• How exhaustive can we be in our investigation given the difficulty of accessing film archives, alongside the positive advent of streaming media such as YouTube?
• What challenges did the pioneers face?
• How did they overcome them?
• What relationships between sound and vision did they establish?
• Are these correlations robust or merely arbitrary?
• Do they occur across the work of different creators, are there commonalities?
• If there are commonalities, can we identify and categorize them in relation to examples?
• Is such thing as a semiotics of visual music a helpful way to think about this?
• What is the legacy of this canon of work?
• How has it informed the work of those currently working in this field?
• Has it moved on considerably or are there still significant issues that are unresolved. E.g. the relationship between colour and pitch, the arbitrary nature visualisation aesthetics, the changing nature of music reference tuning?
• Where do the communities of practice exist around the concept of sound visualisation and who are the current drivers within this field?

This PhD project aims to conduct an exhaustive survey of the visual music canon to address some of these questions. Some of them have been addressed multiple times already resulting in contention and disagreement within the field, the reasons for which need to be explored. Others have not been addressed at all. All of them are fundamental to establishing a clear understanding of what constitutes ‘language’ in the epistemological space of music/sound visualisation.

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