#johnwhitney

“Music, as the true model of temporal structure, is most worthy of study among prior arts. Music is the supreme example of movement become pattern. Music is time given sublime shape. If for no other reason than its universality and its status in the collective mind, music invites imitation. A visual art should give the same superior shape to the temporal order that we expect of music. As with the twenty-six elements of the alphabet, music’s hierarchal pattern of tones provide the model for a visual art with which to “make infinite use of finite means” to construct “architecture.”

The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Géricault

What is the nature and function of motion in all art? What are the relations of motion and emotion?

“A painting, regardless of implicit dynamics, still exists passively fixed in time. But a new art might pattern action in time with all elements in motion at all times. The graphic problem, then, will be how to manipulate a field of visual elements so that all parts will contribute purposely to some temporal (time-structured) design.” (Whitney, 1980:37)

Processing

// Transcription of program arabesque // originally prepared by Paul Rother for John Whitney for the book "Digital Harmony" // ported to the Processing language by Jim Bumgardner

Processing code here: http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/1270

Works by John Whitney (titles in Vertigo by Saul Bass).

Whitney’s work appeals to me because it goes beyond a direct graphical representation of sound. It attempts to translate the concept of sound to visual images (sonic harmony and visual harmony), and therefore (in my view) succeeds in creating visuals that feel like they sound.

Book: Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art (1980), John Whitney (Link to PDF)

Color - pitch relationships

Color organs

Kandinsky (synaesthesia; painted what he heard)

Scriabin

Leon Theremin

The exploration of the relationship between pitch and color has inspired a lot of audiovisual artists today.

Isaac Newton made a graph trying to relate color and pitch, and realized that the math didn’t work out – it was an entirely different waveform space. There’s no relationship between how the eye responds to waveforms and how the ear responds to sound.

iScientist experiment:

Beau Lotto argued that there was a relationship between color and pitch.

Data collected in an experiment including 250 participants revealed that there was no relationship.

One correlation found: between brightness (luminance) of an image and frequency of a sound.

Lower frequency = lower luminance

Higher frequency = higher luminance

John Whitney

No relationship between pitches and any other static discrete visual elements in that way.

If we’re going to do an audiovisual composition - it’s not a piano (ie. here’s a note, here’s an image).

Pitch is not relevant

Frequency ‘relationships’/ratios are relevant.

How the nature of periodocity impacted on our audiovisual experience.

--> Explored through visual motion pattern.

Whitney’s geometry

The Roses of Grandii

Euclidean geometry

Used as a parallel to the sonic harmonic series

“Visual harmonics”

Motion pattern harmonics

Take a shape, extend it to a line of shapes, rotate each one by a factor of its distance from the center.

--> Harmonic relationships in visual motion pattern.

Polar patterns exhibit similar behaviour 

Instead of Cartesian Coordinates we use Polar Coordinates (amplitude and phase), a different way of thinking about the same space.

Used to explore more complex ‘multidimensional harmonics’; the patterns are far more complex.

SYMMETRY and HARMONY; complementary to sound & music. A visual process which is similar to the sound process.

Whitney was never able to directly link visual harmonics with sonic harmonics.

Mick Grierson

Made an Audiovisual Synthesizer – a visual synthesizer that uses the concept of harmonics in order to build a set of painting algorithms.

Creating something that “sounds like it looks” – is it doing the same thing?

Abstraction – the meaning of abstraction – is there a meaning?

Texture

Texture - timbre

Complex dynamics within an image

Texture as a tactile aspect of music

Texture in terms of periodicity - how things operate over time.

Time across space

Audiovisual composition

Both sound & image are treated in the same way and at the same time

The primary material is the audiovisual texture itself. Neither exists without the other. No form difference between the two.

Watch lecture here:

Other links: