A Moden Take on Visual Music #
A short composition that marks first experiment in authoring both music and visuals. The result is a playful animation where every musical element has its visual counterpart.
The piece draws inspiration from Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger’s pioneering work in visual music. Fortunately, we no longer need to draw frame-by-frame on microfilm or suspend hundreds of cardboard cutouts to achieve similar effects!
Using TouchDesigner alongside Ableton, the visuals respond in real-time to the music. Each moving square corresponds to a musical note, while other aspects such as the size of the bass rectangle and the fading opacity of percussion elements are driven by the dynamics of their respective tracks.
Visual elements were designed with their corresponding sounds in mind: percussion is shown as ample, but remains sparse, while notes are expressed through movement within a grid. The design of the visual space also influenced the composition. For example, since each graphical element is fairly large and excessive movement can tire the eye, the number of different instruments was kept small. I also used a 2D grid for the notes, which I found worked best if I limited myself to nine notes (3x3) on both the bass and the harmony sections.