Visual Music
Performance, installation, moving image and sensory experimentation
Visual Music is a series of investigations into the relationships between sound, colour, movement and human perception.
Drawing on colour theory, synaesthesia and John Cage's experimental approaches to musical instruments and chance, the works explore how sound might become visible, and how visual information might be interpreted as music.
Through modified instruments, paint, moving image, immersive colour environments and collaborations with musicians, the project explores the space between composition and improvisation, control and unpredictability.
From the physical marks left by vibrating instruments to the spontaneous interpretations of colour by individual musicians and ensembles, each experiment opens up different possibilities for translating sensory experience.
Crescendo on Canvas
Performance, installation and music video
Crescendo on Canvas explores the transformation of sound into colour, movement and physical marks through live musical performance.
Inspired by John Cage's interventions with musical instruments, a drum kit was altered, its drum skins removed and coloured paint introduced into the instruments. Musician Barry McLean performed live on the modified kit, transforming strikes and rhythm into bursts and splashes of colour that spread across the drums and surrounding canvas-lined space.
Visitors experienced the performance from the entrance, while multiple small cameras captured the paint in motion. The footage was edited into a music video, presented on an angled viewing screen outside the installation.
The work emerged from a wider exploration of visual music, vibration, synesthesia and the relationship between sound and material, allowing rhythm to produce its own unpredictable visual composition.
Colour and Sound - Immersive Installation
A darkened installation explored the relationship between colour, sound and emotional perception. Successive fields of projected colour were accompanied by changing musical compositions, inviting visitors to experience how visual and auditory stimuli might influence one another.
Colour Scores - Collective Improvisation
Existing musical compositions were translated into graphic scores, replacing conventional notes with blocks of colour. Musicians from Stirling's adult and youth orchestra were invited to interpret the scores freely, creating unexpected rhythms and relationships as they responded both to the colours and to each other. Performance took part at the Stirling Albert Hall.
Visual Music - Vocal study
Musicians were filmed responding vocally to individual colours, singing notes that emerged intuitively rather than following a predetermined composition. The resulting film explored the subjective relationship between colour, sound and individual perception.