From Golan Levin’s really awesome presentation last week my main takeaway was the works of Norman McLaren. The audio visual works he showed us really caught my attention. Upon further research into his main years of activity were from 50s to the 80s which made me appreciate his work even more. The kinds of audio-visual art he was doing was extremely groundbreaking for his name, not to mention extremely difficult and time-consuming to create using the means available to him. With modern day computing, generating simple geometric visuals in time with sounds or music is quite simple(I’ve even made simple geometric music visualizations using max). McLaren’s “A Phantasy in Colors” was entirely animated with pastel and then the film was manually synced up to the audio. This level of effort and coordination is absolutely mind boggling.
Anyways, I leave you all with a really neat short film of his I found(apparently an Oscar winning film) with some really interesting sound work. Even though it was released in the 1950s all the sounds used in the film were synthesized.