Image as instrument: What is the next playground for visual music?

Peter Kirn, CDM, Berlin

Close your eyes and listen to music, and what do you see — Colors? Shapes? Cinema?

Music is for nearly everyone a fusion of multiple senses and fantasies. And with each generation of technology, the visual embodiment of music has changed. With electric light came color organs, as used in Scriabin’s Prometheus and by Russian Futurists. With cinema and animation, optics and audio could be fused, again with pioneering work by early experimental artists here in Russia. With television came Nam Jun Paik and MTV, and new styles of editing transformed by music.

And now, a new generation of technology could do it all over again. As editor of CDM (createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com), composer/technologist Peter Kirn will survey the landscape of modern audiovisual creations and how they relate to this history. New work spans lasers, projection, apps, and even the browser.

Then, turning to his own work and free and open source frameworks, he’ll demonstrate how image and music can become a single fused performance instrument. The challenge: to imagine how we might view electronic graphics through the lens of music composition.

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