Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathAudiovisions
 
The Box with the Sound of its Own Making (Morris, Robert)Fontana Mix (Cage, John), 1958
 
 
 

icon: previous page

spatialrepresentational dramaturgy, or even a musical score.

In the further development, with the continued opening up of artistic design methods to time-based processes (performance, installation), the sound being produced almost automatically established itself as an integral part of these works of art, as is the case, for instance, for Jean Tinguely's sounding kinetic sculptures, or for works such as «The Box with the Sound of its Own Making» (1961) by Robert Morris. Conversely, composers take up the openness of the visual reception process as a model for a new concept of musical interpretation by producing graphic scores that leave the sequence of sound elements open. For his «Fontana Mix,» < John Cage used graphic models and formulated rules, on the basis of whose two overlying line structures precise details can be inferred for pitch, duration of the sound, etc. The score was conceived by the composer as an open system of rules, which is clearly defined with a large degree of variability.

In popular music, at that moment at which music

 

leaves out the score, the necessity of renewed interpretation, and the public performance context through its transmission, storage, and synthesis, [5] several waves of the visualization of musical context information occur: At the latest in the 1950s, the image of stars such as Elvis Presley took on a fundamental role in the music marketing process. At about the same time, record cover art began to produce its own aesthetics, one of the pioneers of which was the «Blue Note» jazz label. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rock concert became a brilliant visual stage spectacle accompanied by light and smoke; the invisibility of the star during mass events is counteracted by gigantic video walls. In the 1980s, the videoclip developed into an unavoidable visual counterpart to every pop music song. [6]

Intermediality in Experimentalism

Musical experimentalism, the central figure of whose development was John Cage , is based on an expanded understanding of the material, in which, for example, noises are used on a level equal in value to the sounds of the instruments. However, it is primarily structures

icon: next page