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Music Visualization – The Interplay of Color and Sound
'Susanne Scheel
Susanne Scheel
Simplicity—the art of complexity—The complexity referred to in the title of this year’s Ars Electronica can be found, for example, in our everyday use of technology. The complexity of today’s technologies and the digitization and realtime processes that make it possible to use these technologies in art are often regarded as essential requirements for the realization of artistic projects that deal with a synthesis of image and music. This view is not completely ungrounded, but the fact is that an interest in relating music to image is by no means an invention of the modern age. If we reduce image and music to the concepts of color and sound, we open up a vista on a long tradition of color/sound connections reaching back to ancient Greece and even as far back as prehistoric times. In various periods, a variety of color/sound theories have been developed and diverse attempts made to put these theories into practice. And it is in fact owing to technical advances that at the beginning of the 20th century people were finally in a position to realize to satisfaction their dream of the parallel performance of music and image. Today, simultaneous reception of color and sound, or more precisely moving images and music, as conveyed with the help of technology has become an everyday occurrence, and new symbioses are constantly being formed between pop, high and subcultures.
A short history of sound and color
Over the centuries, man has tried time and again to form relationships between colors and sounds, and to investigate and explain the hidden rules behind such connections. Different eras and mindsets have brought forth varying color/sound analogies or theories. It must be stated from the outset that there is no generally applicable or uniform way of assigning colors to sounds. Up until the 18th century, however, the existence of such a fixed color/sound relationship was never called into question, not until the growing dominance of rationalist thought and the natural sciences began to cast doubt on this hypothesis.(1)
In the earliest history of the various peoples of the earth, colors and sounds formed part of the belief in symbols and creation myths. Together with the elements of water, fire, earth and light, and the planets and seasons, colors and sounds were enlisted to create analogies to help explain the world, frequently in close connection with astrology.(2) With the number-based scientific principle of Pythagoras and the resulting doctrine of the “harmony of the spheres” espoused by the Pythagoreans in the 6th century BC, numerical symbolism began to dominate our understanding of the world, and continued to do so well into the 17th century.(3) As part of his numerical symbolism, Pythagoras created the foundations for the comprehension of musical harmony, intensively studying the music of the spheres, which consisted of purely mathematical tones and supposedly reflected the cosmic order. These tones had in addition a “visible equivalent in the [known] color spectrum.”(4) The basis for this system of analogies is the number seven, the number of planets that had been discovered at the time. 200 years later, this number would also be transferred onto colors by Aristotle, in correspondence with the seven tones of the musical octave.(5) Aristotle’s color scale thus had seven colors,(6) which he assigned to tone intervals with the help of simple numerical relationships, thus forming the basis for the color/sound relationship in antiquity.(7) Aristotle’s color doctrine retained its validity all through the Middle Ages, which likewise produced various color theories, usually oriented along the lines of numerical symbolism, but quite disparate in terms of number and composition of colors.(8)
A decisive turning point in color/sound theory took place in the early 18th century, prompted by Newton’s experiments with prisms and the publication of his Opticks in 1704. He demonstrated that white light is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum and that these can be mathematically equated with the seven intervals of the musical scale. Bolstered by Newton’s authority, a relationship between color and sound now seemed to have been proven by the laws of physics and thus solidly grounded in the natural sciences. His theory did not encounter any criticism until later in the 18th century.(9) However, despite nascent doubts as to the actual existence of a color/sound analogy, additional theories followed, based either on physical/natural laws or on empirical studies of human sensibility, investigating physiological and psychological processes, especially in the Romantic period.
Practical realization
Not only was an attempt made to set down the mutual relationships between color and sound on a theoretical level; people also endeavored to put these relationships into practice. William Moritz presumes that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to project colored lights, around 1500.(10) In the subsequent period, people tried to create special instruments that would be able to produce sounds and colored light simultaneously. Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1527– 1593), who studied alchemy at the Prague court of Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II, is often cited as the first to build a color piano.(11) The existence of such a piano cannot be conclusively proven, however.(12) Arcimboldi’s graphic cembalo is supposed to have demonstrated “a relationship that cannot be precisely specified between heard music and a complete color scale”(13) and “which ranged from black to white, passing through all the colors of the rainbow.”(14)
The work of Louis Bertrand Castel in the 18th century is viewed as the first high point in the practical implementation of color/sound relationships.(15) Castel worked at transferring the idea to art by way of a music of color, and developed the concept of the Clavecin oculaire, or Ocular Harpsichord. This was a color piano that “would offer a play of colors simultaneous with the music, with a shaft of colored light opening with every key pressed.”(16) It cannot however be demonstrated with sufficient certainty that he ever actually finished and presented his Clavecin oculaire.(17) The technical possibilities at the time simply did not allow for the construction of an instrument capable of playing music plus colored lights. By the 19th century, knowledge of color/sound relationships had fallen into oblivion and was only taken up again in the early 20th century.(18)
Music visualization in the 20th century
A number of audio-visual experiments were undertaken especially in the first third of the 20th century concerned primarily with color music or colored light music as well as abstract film. Initially, it was the field of visual art that occupied itself with the connection between colors and sounds. The more abstract and less representational the art, the greater its interest in music. Musical principles were first applied to painting and then to abstract film, while at the same time a number of color instruments were developed.
Nonrepresentational painting
In nonrepresentational painting, Wassiliy Kandinsky was the main artist who turned his attention to musical principles and the possibility of transferring these to visual art.(19) He tried to integrate rhythm and mathematically abstract composition into painting, with the goal of creating a formal language based on simple elements and expressed in a precisely composed work. He assumed that music, as a nonrepresentational art form, had the power to move people both intellectually and emotionally, and he wanted to see if this could work for painting as well. By integrating musical principles, the element of time could for the first time be transferred onto the otherwise frozen genre of painting. Temporal concepts such as rhythm, dynamics, speed and simultaneity were translated onto canvas as artists attempted to capture them pictorially.(20)
Abstract or absolute film
It didn’t take long for film, as a moving medium taking place in time, to be discovered for artistic processes. The abstract or absolute films of the German avant-garde assimilated the idea of integrating musical principles and thus no longer relied on objects, representational function or narrative. Film and music proved to have certain affinities: the moment of movement, the temporal sequence and the process of changing with time.(21) As disparate as the various filmmakers were in their approaches and the resulting films, similarities can still be found. Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling in particular designed their films in the style of musical compositions. Through the medium of film, abstract forms could be conveyed on a temporal axis and the pictorial material presented in a music-like arrangement—painting in motion.(22) What is remarkable is that abstract film in the 1920s remained largely silent, despite being modeled on music. This seems just as absurd as it is logical: “as an internalized and literally ‘imagined’ music, Richter’s, Eggeling’s and Ruttmann’s films had no need for external sound”.(23) The filmmakers, however, with the exception of Eggeling, were not explicitly opposed to the idea of a musical accompaniment for their films.
Oskar Fischinger even designed his films according to musical specifications. He likewise worked with a reduced and usually abstract language of form, but for him music was the point of departure for the filmmaking process: the matching of music to image was based primarily on the flow of music.(24)
Music
In the music world as well, composers tried to combine colors and sounds in their pieces. Alexander Skrjabin was the first major composer to integrate relationships between colors and musical tones in his work, composing a so-called ‘luce’ voice for a color piano for Le poème du feu Promethée.(25) Arnold Schönberg as well took an interest in integrating gestures, colors and lights into the music in Die glückliche Hand, trying to handle these elements like musical notes.(26)
In the course of these multifarious artistic experiments, interest in exploring the color/sound relationship boomed in the 1920s. People thought they were founding a new and successful branch of science, with a focus on synaesthetic studies. Scientific and artistic approaches were given equal weight.(27) A substantial influence on these developments can be attributed to the color-and-light musician Alexander László, whose work we will look at in more detail in the following.
Color music
First, we would like to emphasize again that it was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that a state of technology had been achieved that made it possible to realize the dream of color music. By the 1920s, many instruments capable of playing colors and sounds had been presented to the public: for example, in 1895 by Alexander Wallace Rimington.(28) His color piano was followed by instruments like the color organ invented by Alexander Burnett Hektor, Mary Hallock Greenewalt’s Sarabet, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, the Optophonic Piano created by Russian painter Baranoff-Rossiné, Alexander László’s Sonchromatoscope, the Color-Light Plays courtesy of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Kurt Schwertfeger, and others.(29) As diverse as these instruments and approaches were, all of the color-and-light artists had one thing in common: they were searching for a new artistic genre.(30)
The color-and-light music of Alexander László
After studying piano, Alexander László had a heightened sensitivity to the various timbres his instrument was capable of producing, combined with an ability to see colors while playing. Because of the difficulty of conveying these sensations to others, he came to the decision to integrate these color associations into his concerts and to make them accessible to the audience by means of a specially designed apparatus. He published his theory on color-and-light music for the first time in March 1925, in a newspaper article in which he claimed to have “discovered the solution to the color/sound problem.”(31) His goal was to “merge painting and music as arts.”(32) He took his own personal synaesthetic perceptions as starting point, instead of trying to calculate a physical connection between colors and music—as so often in the history of the color/sound relationship. Formerly, people had often tried to match individual notes on the music scale with certain colors; now László was interested in forming looser associations between sound and color.(33)
Alexander László pursued a synaesthetic approach that allowed him to open up the music of color to the integration of color moods and images. He was not interested in the interplay of single colors and tones, but rather in the genesis of a new art form out of the equal elements of painting and music. In keeping with the currents of his day, he tried to transfer immobile painting onto a temporal plane. In order to combine painting and music into a new art form, he enlisted the technologies available at the time to construct a device that could project colors, forms and images while a pianist was playing: the Sonchromatoscope. Of course, he struggled here with the difference in quality of painting and music in terms of time:
“I had the choice of either taking music, which takes place in time, out of the temporal context, or making fixed and unchanging painting evolve over time in order to find a common denominator between both art forms. It is obvious why I chose the latter. I took the painted picture out of its frozen state and let it unfold in the same temporal framework as the musical composition.”(34)
But László didn’t want “colored surfaces to merely appear in a harmonious sequence, but rather abstract pictures as a presentation set to music.”(35) He thus went beyond a pure color illustration and instead integrated whole images. Starting in 1926, experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger then supplemented this music of colored light with his abstract films.(36)
The Sonchromatoscope
Alexander László used projection as a means to equate non-temporal painting with temporal music. His Sonchromatoscope produced a four-part projection to the accompaniment of piano music, creating three-part images with the fourth level made up of complex superimposed colors and forms.(37) László worked with slides, movable abstract forms and colored light. The projections followed an exact score for which László had composed the music. The Sonchromatoscope consisted of a switchboard used to operate it, along with four large and four small projectors that were connected with one another. The switchboard was equipped with keys and levers and was described as being “similar to a harmonium.”(38) From here, each projector could be controlled and the various color and image levels mixed, comparable to the function of today’s mixing console. The Sonchromatoscope was placed opposite the stage at the other end of the room, while László sat on a podium playing the piano, the screen behind him. The audience was thus between László and the switchboard operator. The switchboard was framed by the two main projectors I and II, which László described as “bringing the essential, the elementary, the main event, the picture”.(39) These were in turn framed by the two secondary projectors III and IV, which produced the secondary motifs. These four large projectors were then connected with four small footlight machines. These were the “carriers of the actual pictorial motifs, which, as in slide projections, were shifted abruptly and switched on and off.”(40)
It is difficult to reconstruct today how László’s color and light concerts actually might have looked since no photographs exist of the performances. We may assume that his presentations were multicolored and that, through the use of several projection planes, were also many-layered and probably abstract. The many colors and layers presented must have been quite impressive with their “manifold, stimulatingly colored and surprising images.”(41)
Alexander László’s career with colored lights and music lasted only two short years, coming to an abrupt end in autumn 1927. Even so, he enjoyed an extraordinary amount of fame, reaching beyond Germany’s borders. The reviews of his concerts ran the gamut from “euphoric approbation”(42) to just as unconditional rejection. Sobering is the general conclusion of his critics that László had failed to fulfill his own, widely propagated aspiration of creating a synthesis between two equal arts in order to give birth to a new total work of art.(43)
Electronic and digital images
While in the early 1930s interest in color instruments waned, experimental film was just coming to the fore. The experimental filmmakers on the American west coast in particular avidly took up Oskar Fischinger’s ideas, and their visual music exerted a considerable influence on subsequent generations of artists. With the development of electronics, the exploration of audiovisual forms of representation at first shifted from motion pictures/film to the “moving medium of the electronic image (video, digital).”(44) Up until this time, the visualization of music had concentrated on the interplay of the elements of sound and image as analogy or as a synchronous process. Electronics, however, now gave rise to video art and movements such as Fluxus that focused more on the interplay of art and music in an attempt to achieve a “fusion of the media based on intertextuality, intermediality, and interaction.”(45) The free-form, intermedia Fluxus events, happenings and performances released the acoustic, visual or sculptural elements of the arts and media from their original reference point, so that finally everything could be related to everything else.(46)
The interplay of sound and color or music and (moving) image can take many forms but must always be viewed in the context of cultural processes as well as artistic and theoretical investigations. A new form of music visualization has evolved on today’s club scene, known as VJing. Now also active beyond the confines of club culture, VJs are increasingly influencing the visual aesthetic in other artistic realms. An audiovisual phenomenon, VJing combines (electronic) music and moving images in the form of a performance made possible by digital technologies. Similar to what a DJ does, a VJ uses modern technology to ‘mix’ music with moving images, so-called “visuals,” by way of spontaneous association and rhythmic interpretation, live and in realtime, and then projects the results onto screens or monitors. The rhythmic structure of the moving images is dictated by the DJ’s music mix. VJing is part of the overall club experience and is thus part of a cultural practice that—beyond the club context—exhibits links to fields such as design, architecture, art and graphic design. Of course, VJing did not simply emerge from a void, but can instead be traced aesthetically and technically to the tradition of the audiovisual art forms presented above. Similar to László, music and moving image are generated separately.
Music visualizations in the 20th century are distinguished by the integration of technology into artistic processes. Today’s forms of music visualization tend to make use of digital technologies and realtime processes. Even during the first third of the 20th century, however, the pioneers of color music and experimental film were already testing the use of technical practices for producing visual translations of music. With advancing technology, more and more opportunities for interconnecting music and image became available as the decades passed. Today’s audiovisual forms display a great deal of freedom in combining music and image, or in general in merging various art forms. We can thus conclude that in the 20th century technology has found special applications in art, especially in terms of new formative possibilities.(47) In recent years in particular, it can be observed that contemporary, usually electronic music is exerting a substantial influence on graphic and visual forms of expression seen in the creation of media images, and that music is often reflected in the visual arts—a phenomenon that strongly shapes our everyday culture. These developments are evident both in the integration of media art approaches in the traditional performing arts of opera, theatre and ballet, as well as in the context of exhibitions and art festivals. Ars Electronica’s Futurelab has undertaken impressive experiments in the past few years aimed at creating new forms of music visualization by utilizing modern technologies and extending their possibilities or adding special new enhancements. In terms of visualizing already-existing music, for example, the pilot project Das Rheingold—Visionized was launched in 2004, followed by the 3-D visualization of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.(48) Or, in the interest of creating completely new forms of representation by means of targeted collaboration between visual and musical artists, projects have been undertaken such as Music Plays Images x Images Play Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Toshio Iwai, part of Ars Electronica 1997. This resulted in “a performance that fuses musical sounds with visual images in a wide variety of ways. From the resulting feedback, a completely new kind of space of musicality and visuality emerged.”(49)
Whatever the future brings for musical visualizations, the technical possibilities for audiovisual presentation are by no means exhausted, and the exploration of ways to combine colors and music continues unabated, having lost nothing of its fascination.
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
Susanne Scheel revised excerpt from Magister degree thesis “VJing – Music Visualization in the 20th Century”
(1)
Jewanski, 1999, 579ff  zurück
(2)
Jewanski, 1999, 67ff zurück
(3)
Jewanski, 1999, 73ff zurück
(4)
Moritz, 1987, (18) zurück
(5)
Jewanski, 1999, 83ff zurück
(6)
Weiß, Gelb, Rot, Purpur, Grün, Blau und Schwarz zurück
(7)
Jewanski, 1999, 87, 582f zurück
(8)
Jewanski, 1999, 120f zurück
(9)
Jewanski, 1999, 229ff, 253, 259ff, 583 zurück
(10)
Moritz, 1987, 19 zurück
(11)
Cf., for example, Moritz, 1987, 19f; Schneider, 2003 zurück
(12)
Jewanski, 1999, 170-179 zurück
(13)
Moritz, 1987, 20 zurück
(14)
ibid. zurück
(15)
Jewanski, 1999, 274 zurück
(16)
Jewanski, 1999, 584 zurück
(17)
Jewanski, 1999, 292-294, 323-338. zurück
(18)
Jewanski, 1999, 585ff zurück
(19)
Cf. Weibel, 1987, 59f; Kiebscherf, 1998, 45f; Hahl-Koch, 1985, 354-359 zurück
(20)
Cf. Emons, 2000, 235ff zurück
(21)
Emons, 1987, 51 zurück
(22)
Emons, 1987, 53 zurück
(23)
Emons, 2000, 251 zurück
(24)
Muxel, 2003, 45 zurück
(25)
Jewanski, 1999, 40f zurück
(26)
Kienscherf, 1996, 149ff zurück
(27)
Jewanski, 1999, 13 zurück
(28)
Jewanski, 1999, 40 zurück
(29)
Cf. Hahl-Koch, 1985; Jewanski, 1999, 17; Moritz, 1987, 21ff; Centre Pompidou, 2004 zurück
(30)
Jewanski, 1997, 17 zurück
(31)
Jewanski, 1997, 15 zurück
(32)
László in Jewanski, 1997, 15 zurück
(33)
Jewanski, 2000, 53 zurück
(34)
Jewanski, 2000, 53 zurück
(35)
ibid. zurück
(36)
Jewanski, 2000, 20f zurück
(37)
Jewanski, 2000, 21 zurück
(38)
Schröter [1925] in Jewanski, 2000, 56 zurück
(39)
László in Jewanski, 1997, 22 zurück
(40)
Jewanski, 2000, 57 zurück
(41)
Jewanski, 1997, 32 zurück
(42)
Jewanski, 1997, 28 zurück
(44)
Weibel, 1987, 108 zurück
(45)
Weibel, 1987, 116 zurück
(46)
Weibel, 1987, 116f zurück
(47)
Cf. also Franke, 1979, 1 zurück
(48)
Deutsch, Johannes, 2004; o.V., 2005 zurück
(49)
Iwai, Toshio & Sakamoto; Ryuichi, 1997 zurück
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