Visual Music-Futurism

Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra


Electricity opened new possibilities for projected light, which were exploited by the British painter A. Wallace Rimington, whose Colour Organ formed the basis of the moving lights that accompanied the 1915 New York premiere of Scriabin's synaesthetic symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire, which had indications of precise colors in the score. Scriabin wanted everyone in the audience to wear white clothes so that the projected colors would be reflected on their bodies and thus possess the whole room.

A similar demand for white-clad audience was posited by the Italian Futurist artists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, who experimented with "color organ" projection in 1909 and painted some nine abstract films directly on film-stock in 1911. The German Hans Stoltenberg also experimented with drawing abstractions on film about this same time, and the Finnish/Danish/Russian Leopold Survage (then resident in Paris, and friends with Picasso and Modigliani) prepared hundreds of sequential paintings for an abstract film Rythme Coloré, which he hoped to film in one of the new multicolor processes that were being developed, but the onset of World War I prevented that; he sold a number of the paintings, so that they were widely dispersed and have still not been filmed




Luigi Russolo, 1911
 The clearest clue is provided in a manifesto on "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells", by his comrade Carlo Carrà: - "...rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam, yellows, as violent as can be.


The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells by Carrà, Carlo. 1913

The Futurist Cinema by f.t. marinetti, bruno corra, emilio settimelli, arnaldo ginna, giacomo balla and remo chiti 15th November 1916 

Links:
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~musima/visualmusic/visualmusic.htm
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/maistre1.htm
http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/paintsound.html

Goal on mind

1. An interactive device or instillation which will allow audience to play with visual and music.
2. Interpret music combine with abstract and concrete forms.
3. Projection.

Interactive projects

http://herraizsoto.com/works/2009/labuat/soytuaire/

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Debussy Clair de lune

Inspirations

Matteo Negrin: Music Painting

This piece is combining music sheet and illustration to create the mood of music and convey a message to the audience. It is surprised that those two elements can work so well together. The notes interact with drawing elements to have certain meaning as music goes by. It gave me another way of thinking how visuals can enhance or alter the mood depends on how authors create them.

Forss: City Ports

This is a music video within absolute abstract forms to represent rhythm, beat and sound. Although these forms are meaningless, the linear and spatial qualities of forms give viewers some space to perceive and imagine.  The movement of linear single color forms corresponds with music and sound effect which has a strong sense of three dimensional space. The color silver has the sense of technology, cold, speed, and futurism which also responds to the music.

Ideas for visualizing music

Frank Russo helps make music for the deaf. 



Working with a team of researchers, the Ryerson psychology professor invented a chair that allows deaf people to feel music through vibrations. He also works with both deaf and hearing musicians to compose music that focuses on vibrations and vision rather than sound. 


Media
Watch TED Talks in Toronto Prof. Russo, a music cognition expert who also sings and plays guitar, will discuss music without sound at the TEDx Talks in Toronto Thursday. The conference’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.” 


Your talk will be on experiencing music without sound. Tell me more. 


I plan to talk about the other modalities – or the other senses – and whether or not we can experience music through these other senses. This is interesting from a scientific perspective. It also has some interesting practical and artistic implications when we’re considering music experienced by the deaf. 


Performers do things when they’re performing that convey emotion and these things can be seen. So, for example, when a performer is performing something that is melancholy, their movements are melancholy. By movements, I mean their facial expressions, the way that their body moves, the way that their hands move. There’s really a lot that can be seen that conveys important structural and emotional information about music. There’s [also] a long history of the deaf experiencing music through vibration. 


Legend has it that in his later years, a deafened Beethoven cut the legs off his piano to feel the vibrations through the floorboards. How do deaf people experience music and how does this inform your work? 


Deaf culture is extremely visual and it also involves the body, more prominently I would say than oral cultures. So their experience of music, maybe not surprisingly, is informed by what they see and what they feel. There’s this long history of feeling music. For example, there’s a famous percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. She’s deaf and she talks about experiencing music through her body. So she’ll perform without shoes so that she can feel the vibration through her body. 


You and a team of researchers at Ryerson developed the emoti-chair. What is it and how does it work? 


The emoti-chair is a sensory substitution technology that’s designed to take sound and present it to the body as vibration. You can put your hand on a speaker and you can feel the vibration because all sound emanates from some form of vibration. The challenge, though, with touching a speaker or even touching a musical instrument is what we call perceptual masking. Perceptual masking occurs in vibration when the lower frequency vibrations dominate the higher frequency vibrations. So all we feel is the thump, thump, thump. So what we’ve done in the emoti-chair is separate out the frequencies and present them to different parts of the body. We’ll take the high frequencies and we’ll present them to the upper part of the back. We’ll take the lower frequencies in the music signal and we’ll present them to the lower part of your back. 


You’ve held a couple dozen concerts for deaf and hard-of-hearing people with the emoti-chair. What are the concerts like? 


It’s really evolved. We’ve gone from taking prefabricated music that’s been constructed for hearing ears and have translated it into deaf music. We are now doing something entirely different, where from the conceptualization of the music we’re thinking about this as a vibe track or a piece of music that’s primarily for vibration and vision, not sound. So that opens up all sorts of interesting artistic possibilities for the deaf and hearing community. 


It sounds like you’re almost creating a new art form of music without sound. 


That’s what we like to think, yeah. And we actually are putting on a series of workshops across the country where we’re exploring this. We did one in Vancouver last June. We’re going to do the next one at the Banff Centre for the Arts next spring. At these workshops, we’re trying to bring together music performers or composers that want to work on this new art form, on developing something that’s music-like but has this reallocation of the sensory priorities so that vibration and vision are in the foreground. 


Do people who experience music without sound also experience the emotion that is so much a part of music? 


Absolutely. We have been doing some research in the lab along those lines. And yes, there’s a great deal of agreement between the emotion experienced by a deaf individual and a hearing individual. 


This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clean air act

Here's a brief timeline of clean air act in America.
http://www.edf.org/documents/2695_cleanairact.htm

By 1995, the percentage of U.S. children with elevated blood-lead levels has dropped from 88.2% in the 1970s to 4.4%, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


By 2000, Almost all the pollutants that contribute to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards have significantly decreased since 1970:

• Carbon Monoxide: 31% decrease
• Sulfur Dioxide: 27% decrease
• Particulate Matter* (PM-10): 71% decrease
• Lead: 98% decrease

The health effect to 2020
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/6427a6b7538955c585257359003f0230/f8ad3485e788be5a8525784600540649!OpenDocument

The clean air act is under attack.
http://www.adventure-journal.com/2011/04/earth-days-best-legacy-the-clean-air-act-is-under-attack/

New policy: Clear skies in New York State
http://www.epa.gov/clearskies/state/ny.html

Case study: Fear v.s. Humor

Case study: Fear: AIDS is a mass murder (Germany)
Humor: Love life, stop AIDS (Switzerland)

Fear and Humor are common to be used in graphic design. The purpose of the public campaign is to make impact, and to be remembered easily by viewers. In this case, I would like to compare the efficiency of fear and humor, and how they are used in the AIDS campaign.

In both aspects, the method is to use metaphor of the images and embrace the complexity rather than presenting straight answers.

AIDS is a mass murder. 2009 (Germany)

The “AIDS is a mass murderer” awareness campaign was designed in Germany by Regenbogen e.V. in conjunction with the advertising agency, “das comitee.”

The creators of the ad campaign chose these men according to their website because “it features the greatest mass murderers in recent history having sex.”

“The campaign is designed to shake people up, to bring the topic of AIDS back to centre stage, and to reverse the trend of unprotected sexual intercourse.”

According to Witte and Allen in 2000, Fear appeals are most effective when they contain both a high-treat AND a high-efficiency component. The aim of the campaign to scare people extremely. It is designed to terrify people. What I've learned at school is that if you want to emphasize something, you should use it to the limit. I think this is a good example. Although I like the metaphor of the images, I also worry that by using historical figures to interpret murderers, the message may be misleading.

The debate about the efficiency can be seen here.


Love life, stop AIDS. 2006 (Switzerland)

Stop Aids is an example of one of the longest running and most carefully evaluated social marketing programs for AIDS prevention in the world. Its initial audience was gay men, but as the epidemic began to expand it reached out to a truly national audience. Its most important difference was to constantly measure not only condom use, but changing attitudes toward the epidemic.

The national Aids prevention campaign has never tried to get its message across with scenarios that transmit fear, threats or horror. The campaign has always sought to draw on scientific facts in order to make a distinction between situations which could potentially lead to infection with HIV and situations which are not associated with a risk. The campaign supports the belief that it is not the task of the state to pass judgement on the sexual practices adopted by individuals, and has avoided mixing public health aspects with moral values.

The tag line in the posters is: "No action without protection." I got my Aha momnet while I saw the tag line. I like how the designer manipulate the hockey and fencing players wearing nothing to symbolize no protection.

I am interested in how efficiency can fear and humor be in the design. I think for my thesis, this is one aspect I want to explore.


Reference:

• Ehlers, Dineke. 2007. "The efficiency of fear appeals in South African HIV/AIDS campaign texts." Pretoria, South Africa. University of South Africa.
• Mohan, Shivani. 2009. "Humor and design." Chicago. IIT Institute of Design.

Thesis Direction

I've been thinking about what design's role in preventing air pollution. As we discussed earlier, the goal is to raise awareness. How can design raising awareness? By positive or by negative attitude? By fear or optimism? Which one is working better?

So I think I would like to discuss on the relationship between fear, humor, and graphic design by a campaign for improving air quality.

The questions I would like to discuss are:

• How can design impact on people's fear of health?
• How can design make fun of the issue?
• How graphic design can work with or against fear?
• How can design raise questions of fear and humor?
• What rules can be followed?
• Which one is working better? fear or humor?

Case study: This is the air we breathe

Case study:
This is the air we breathe.
http://www.sproutreach.com/blog/design-for-environmental-causes/the-air-we-breathe/

Jenny Bergström, a designer and researcher in Stockholm, used a flock printing technique to display air pollution over time in an urban environment.

An excerpt from her website:

This is the air we breathe… provides instant feedback on our actions in the city. By using a technique for printing called ‘flock’ a dirt absorbing text or pattern can be printed on a less dirt absorbing surface and create a slow but direct response on pollution. People passing every day by car will be reminded of how they effect the urban environment.

In the city we are used to being approached by information from almost all directions. The commercialized urban environment consists of messages, constantly fighting for our attention, loud and/or with rapidly moving images. This is the air we breathe… uses another method in order to communicate. It demands time from the receiver and it does not deliver a straight answer.

I found it is quite interesting that the drivers can see what was happening. Invisible became visible. Design for awareness like this can have impact on fear. How design can manipulate fear? What rules can be followed by using fear? Is it working better than optimistic attitude?