MUSIC 263, Spring 1999 : Visual Music
Miller Puckette (msp@ucsd.edu)

It is now becoming possible to produce live performances which intimately combine visual and musical elements using computers. This seminar will explore both theoretical and practical aspects of Visual Music (which we'll take to mean, "works of multimedia art which have a musical structure."

We will concentrate on combining music with computer graphics but won't exclude computer-controlled lighting, robotics, or even "natural" visual elements such as dance. How can visual and audible media "work" together, if the two senses obey such different rules? Can visual elements be transposed into audible ones? Can the two move in counterpoint? How can they both contribute to a single, shared form?

On the practical side, we'll use the Pd and GEM software packages to combine audio analysis, processing, and synthesis with computer graphics and image processing. Participants will produce a short Visual Music experiment, whose focus could either be primarily artistic or technological.