Back Seminar by Clarence Barlow on his compositional approaches

Seminar by Clarence Barlow on his compositional approaches

26.06.2015

 

2 Jul 2015

The composer Clarence Barlow will give a seminar entitled "Visualising Sound – Sonifying the Visual" on Thursday July 2nd at 15:30h in room 55.410 of the Communication Campus of the UPF.

Abstract: 
The visualisation of musical sound can be pursued in a number of ways, two of which are rooted in technical considerations: the music could be intended for human performance, resulting in the development of a prescriptive performance score. If electroacoustic components are present in this music, these are often included as a graphic depiction (e.g. of the sound wave or as a sonagramme, or one reflecting the compositional methods etc.), thus more properly fulfilling a second main function – a descriptive one, mainly used in documentations, lectures and/or study scores (e.g. Ligeti’s Artikulation or Stockhausen’s Study II), but also sometimes prescriptively as part of a sort of (re-) construction kit.
Two other different approaches are rooted in the aesthetical (and possibly the synaesthetical): in sound visualisation it could simply be sound-derived images that satisfy; in the converse, image sonification, it could instead be the pleasure of extracting convincing music from optical sources, a comparison of source and result adding to the enjoyment. In multimedia such as film it could be the counterpoint of sound and image that pleases, especially if these are clearly bonded to another as when sound visualisation or image sonification is involved.
In the above, the vectors prescription-description and visualisation-sonification can work both ways, i.e. a prescriptive score is also potentially descriptive, one could (re-)imagine a visualised sound aurally, a sonified image visually.
In this presentation I would like to concentrate on these latter (syn-)aesthetic aspects as exemplified in my own work of several decades, having long been fascinated by the links between sound and image. These links mainly involve the concepts of  Position and Motion as well as of Colour, all of which are not only important aspects of music but fundamentally spatial, ultimately visual concepts: in musical contexts one speaks of “high” and “low”, of “fast” and “slow” (all of which comprise spatial terms – for instance the tempo indication andante literally means “walking”) as well as of “bright” and “dark” sounds and of “sound-colour”. Starting over thirty years ago, I have especially in recent times been repeatedly drawn to enacting these parallels. The first five examples are of sound visualisation, the last five (plus a footnote) of image sonification.

Barlow's website

Multimedia

Categories:

SDG - Sustainable Development Goals:

Els ODS a la UPF

Contact