History of Visualizing Sound, Pre-Computers
For my research assignment in our "Tech on Stage" module in 544, I began researching Golan Levin. However, as I was reading his thesis paper, I became enthralled in the history of visualizing sound, and decided to dig more into this field.
The first well-known experiment in visualizing music took place in 1730 and was pioneered by the French Jesuit monk Lois Bertrand Castel, who was also a well-known mathematician and physicist. He believed that each of the seven units of the scale corresponded directly with one of the seven colors of the light spectrum:
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~musima/visualmusic/visualmusic.htm
Kenneth Peacock, "Instruments to perform color-music: Two centuries of technological experimentation," Lenorado, 1988.
and he wished to give the colors an intensified quality of liveliness and lightness which he felt they lacked upon a canvas, where he believed them to be without life or motion.
Castel constructed an Ocular Harpsichord, which consisted of a 6-foot square screen mounted above a normal harpsichord. The frame was made up of 60 small windows, each with a different colored glass pane and a small curtain attached by pullies to a specific key. Each time the key was played, the curtain would lift briefly to allow light to travel to the glass pane and display the corresponding color. In 1754, Castel built an “improved” model with over 500 candles with mirrors to project light for a larger audience(prior to this people had to visit his studio to see the harpsichord in action).
Castel predicted that every home in Paris would one day have an Ocular Harpsichord for recreation, and dreamed of a factory making some 800,000 of them. However, the technology was so clumsy and did not become as popular as he dreamt it would be. “What stranger enterprise could be imagined in the whole field of art,” wrote Castel, “than to make sound visible, to make available
to the eyes those many pleasures which Music affords to the
ears?”
Castel’s work inspired many other artists to pursue visual music instruments, such as Frederic Kasner, Bainbridge Bishop, McKinnon Wood, Jordon Belson and many others through the twentieth century. These artists all employed similar methods of corresponding colors and lights to certain notes.
However, in the early 20th century, Thomas Wilfred decided to break away from attempting a direct mapping between color and sound. A Danish-born American, Wilfred worked with a group of Theosophists who sought to create color organ that demonstrated spiritual principles. In his research, Wilfred discovered the failures and differences of his predecessors, and decided that there was no direct correlation between color and sound whatsoever. Instead, he focused his attention on creating an instrument that displayed light without the need for sound or music, or only used them as accessories.
The first instrument was the “Clavilux” and worked similar to an organ and pipes, consisting of a large keyboard with sliding keys and stops that could be couple to obtain different colors, six projectors and some auxiliary reflectors. His following series of performances were called Lumia, and he toured with the instrument until housing a 32-projector Clavilux in the Art Institute of Light in NYC, which he also founded. Wilfred also constructed self-playing instruments that would run themselves, as well as Home Clavilux systems.
Wilfred argued that Lumia compositions could not be compared to music or paint, and believed that this art of moving light had to be judged on its own merits. (balh)
In an opposite line of work, many artists investigated the possibility of visually creating music. In the late 1940’s, the abstract animator Oskar Fishinger experimented with “sound scroll” – long sheets of paper on which he would draw the sound waves.
Simultaneously, the animator Norman McLaren developed a variety of template-based methods. McLaren created index cards that each corresponded with a note in the chromatic scale.
In the early 1950’s, John and James Whitney created a system of pendulums using decommissioned war machinery, which would periodically interrupt the light arriving at a film shutter. By slowly advancing the film past the shutter and swinging the pendulums back and forth, the Whitneys were able to record optically a soundtrack on the film.
By combining the senses of sight and sound, and experience can be created which feels more immersive than if the visual and audio components of a piece are created independent of on another. There are many instances of serendipity, in which the music and the video match perfectly; however, the organic creation of the two elements with one another can produce an incredible sensory experience for the audience, and is something I enjoy both as a spectator and as an artist.