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Translation, Emphasis, Synthesis, Disturbance: On the function of music in visual music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2012

Anton Fuxjäger
Anton Fuxjäger*
Affiliation:
Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Hofburg, Batthyanystiege, A-1010 Vienna, AUSTRIA
*
E-mail: anton.fuxjaeger@univie.ac.at
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Abstract

Starting from the premiss that the central aesthetic feature of non-representational moving images (visual music) is their structuring of reception time, the function of the accompanying music in contributing to the total (combined) temporal structure of the resulting artwork is discussed. A taxonomy of the different roles that music can play in the production and reception of visual music consisting of three basic categories is presented and examples are given:

  • • ‘Music translations’: certain parameters of the accompanying music are transcoded into certain visual parameters, the accompanying music thereby provides the temporal structure of the audiovisual artwork.

  • • ‘Synthetic structures’: the music and the images provide different temporal informations with enough coincidences to be synthesised into a combined audiovisual strucuture by the viewer/listener.

  • • ‘Mutual disturbance’: the aforementioned process fails to be realised due to a lack of sufficient points of synchronisation. As a result the accompanying music will disrupt the recognition of the temporal structure of the images and vice versa.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 17 , Issue 2: Composing Motion: A visual music retrospective , August 2012 , pp. 120 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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