Composition, Color

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Composition,Color Visual Music
Modded from Ali Mazalek
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Color Systems
Subtractive Color - Paint or printing process -
One begins with white and ends with black as one
adds color, the result gets darker and tends to
black
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow
Additive Color - Computer screen - Begins with
black and ends with white as more color is
added, the result is lighter and tends to white
Red, Green, Blue
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Mapping color to music

• Pitch to hue
• Dark to deep
• Music timbre tone to color tone
• Tempo and shape

http//www.rhythmiclight.com/
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Color Organs

• Mapping keystrokes to sound and light
• - 1742 ocular harpsichord by jesuit
  mathematician and physicist Louis Bertrand
  Castrel
• - 1893 color organ by Bainbridge Bishop
• - 1914 Wallace Rimington's NYC premiere of
  Scriabin's synaesthetic symphony Prometheus A
  Poem of Fire

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Futurists

• Explorations of the correspondence between color
  and music
• For example, the Italian artists Arnaldo Ginna
  and Bruno Corra experimented with "color organ"
  projection in 1909

"Music" by Luigi Russolo, 1911
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Expressionists

• Kandinskys attempt at developing a theory of
  composition based on music

Kandinsky, Improvisation 31, 1913
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Dadaists Rotorelief discs

• Marcel Duchamp
• Anemic Cinema, 1926
• Played on a photograph or as a stand-alone piece

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Clavilux

• Thomas Wilfred, 1889-1968
• - Clavilux color organ, "Lumia" art form of
  kinetic color projections
• - Polymorphous fluid streams of color slowly
  metamorphosing
• - Established and Art Institute of Light in NYC

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Painting Color Music

• Color composition derived from three bars of
  music in the key of green (Australian artist Roy
  De Maistre, 1935)

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Lumigraph

• Oskar Fischinger's color organ

Fischinger's Lumograph was licensed for use in
the 1960's sci-fi film, Time Travelers
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Abstract Film

• Hans Richter
• - Painter and early abstract filmmaker
• - Considered part of the Dada movement
• - His 1921 fillm Rythmus was not as he claimed
  the first abstract film, but it was nonetheless
  important

Workers, 1911
Richters Rythmus 21, 1921
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Direct Film

• Len Lye (1935 - 1980)
• Experimental filmmaker, kinetic sculptor,
  theorist, painter and writer
• Wanted to compose motion just like musicians
  compose sound
• Pioneered "direct film"
• i.e. film made without a camera, by painting and
  scratching images directly onto celluloid,
  reworking found footage, casting shadows of
  objects onto unexposed film, and experimenting
  with early color techniques

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Computer/Automated Animation
John Whitney, Sr. (1935 - 1996) Experimental
filmmaker, inventor Considered by many to be the
father of computer animation Created first motion
graphics system, for which he won an Academy
Award in 1985 Designed famous title sequence for
Hitchcocks Vertigo with Saul Bass Objective of
his art was to create a synthesis of visuals and
music
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Light Sculptors

• Paul Friedlander
• Kinetic light sculptor and computer artist

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Real-Time Abstract Animation and Synthetic Sound

• Golan Levin, MIT Media Lab 2000
• AVES Audiovisual Environment Suite
• Set of 5 interactive systems that allow people to
  create and perform abstract animation and
  synthetic sound in real time