Visualizing sound appears to be quite the open ended world for experimentation if our lecture with Golan Levin was any indicator. While an A->B sound to audio structure certainly has a lot to explore on it’s own, what caught my eye the most was the way some of the artists we looked at had the sights dictating the sound as much as the other way around. This was very evident in the Norman McLaren piece Synchromy, where the sonic and visual elements were generated at the same time from the same medium. The piece that interested me the most however (and has lead to lots of fun listening time since then) is the Music for Oscilloscopes project by Jerobeam Fenderson.
The kickstarter video by itself is a tour de force of weird sounds colliding with themselves in green shapes you might never expect soundwaves to make. Any sound in this video would be sufficient fodder to build entire songs around in the psy-trance electronic area (Think this type of stuff), yet the visual element remains surprisingly cohesive. It certainly makes me wonder how various processing effects might change the outcome of these green crossing points, or what the visual outcome of changing one axis of the oscilloscope’s color might be. More to the point however, this piece does seem to produce a perfect middle point with audiovisual work where the audio would mean much less without the visual context as would the visuals with no audio. Hopefully this sort of synergetic behavior is something we can work towards in class on one project or another.