VISUAL MUSIC
You can't hear a piece of music all at once, but you can see it.
The images on this page were constructed by colour-coding music. Repetition of patterns, visible in the images, are one of the tools composers use to set up musical expectations, then defy, delay and finally fulfill them. The ultimate gratification gives us a hit of dopamine, which partly explains our passion for music.
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Rose Red, English folk song sung in a round. Each of the 4 voices has its own layer in the animation.
Created for my artist talk at the Become Become Artist Residency in Sardinia, Italy, 2018 to demonstrate the visual music process and used in talks in Ireland, Spain and Italy since.
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Sometimes I weave the designs into tapestries with thousands of tiny glass beads. I love coloured glass; watching it dance with light stirs the same sense of awe I feel when listening to music. The beads I use come in hundreds of different colours, textures, and finishes, providing a powerful set of tools for expression.
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Composer Ryan Molloy kindly provided me with this feedback on the visual music of one of his pieces.
"... with this [colour] scheme it becomes clear how strongly D-centric this passage is and also how much C (or surrounding inflections) gravitates around that pitch. This highlights an interval of a minor 7th which I've long been very close to and I've known it influences my music but this actually flags it up in black and white! (Or in Red and Blue in this case!)"
"... with this [colour] scheme it becomes clear how strongly D-centric this passage is and also how much C (or surrounding inflections) gravitates around that pitch. This highlights an interval of a minor 7th which I've long been very close to and I've known it influences my music but this actually flags it up in black and white! (Or in Red and Blue in this case!)"
