Visual Music - Yvonne Eckersley

In this lecture we were taught about how music can be linked with sight in the form of colour and movement. This is something we have already been taught because we have Yvonne as one of our tutors so none of this is particularly new, however I'll review it anyway.

Yvonne taught us that many scientists and musicians have attempted to link these two senses as far back as 1669 when an argument was put forward for the spectrum of white light to include a 'musical division'. Since then there have been several inventions specifically made to experiment with colour and music. For example, 1730 saw Castel introduce his 'Ocular Harpsichord', which was a harpsichord with several strips of coloured paper linked to certain notes that when pressed, would be visible. This was a very similar design to Rimington's 'Colour Organ' which worked in the same way.

Rimington and his 'Colour Organ'

In 1919, Thomas Wilfred came up with the idea that light should be considered as an art form called 'Lumia' and should remain as a silent art form - sounds riveting. Luckily he changed his mind however and revealed to the world his Clavilux, a complex instrument that allowed the player to create colourful patterns appear on a screen while music played. It was described as being beautiful but the design was incredibly complex and hard to reproduce, apparently Thomas Wilfred was a great artist but not a very good mechanic.

This does actually look pretty cool

More recently, Norman McLaren has experimented with music and colour- painting straight onto bits of film because he couldn't afford any other materials. His work usually consists of coloured shapes moving around to music and he rarely uses and characters or story. After being shown a few bits of his work i can easily say i am not a fan, they get very boring, very quickly, but it is clear he spent a lot of time on them. Here is some of his work:

Even though I'm not a big fan of the examples of visual music Yvonne showed us, i do think there is a connection between sight and music, especially when it comes to colour, for example very few people would hear a very deep loud noise and then in their head imagine the colour yellow or pink would they? Most people associate noise with black or navy and graceful music with light colours.

It is a shame that Yvonne didn't mention 'Waltzing Waters', a very interesting and pretty display of water fountains carefully timed to music with lights flashing through the water. I've seen it for myself and it seems much more interesting than the colour organ etc. and gives better evidence that colour and music are linked. Sadly i seemed to be one of very few people who found this lecture useful, although there was barely any relevance to my course it was interesting but it didn't seem to interest many others.

Maybe this would have been more interesting: Waltzing Waters