Music Now Is More Of A Visual Art

 

A Dall-E

 After years of alternating between music and visual art, I've realized certain connections between them where I can share creative processes, but not always. For example, when I finish a song or album, I might do a video on it. But it's still music and doesn't have to have associated visual elements. Other times it starts with something visual, especially with Music For Photographs, which was like scoring for a film, which is typically driven by aesthetics or "looks". If someone comments on some visual element in the video it doesn't necessarily relate with what I was thinking of when I was writing the music. When I'm playing instruments it's not a visual phenomenon; I'm not thinking of aesthetics. Aesthetics in music has to do with production. When I create ambient music, a lot of it is visual thinking. I know it's a cliche at this point, but it's like painting. Using the metaphor that music is like painting was something that started in the 90s or 80s. People have always been putting those two things together. It makes sense because somewhere in the brain those two areas are in the cross-fire of adjacent neurons, particularly with artists. It's more that musicians can think visually than visual artists can think musically. As to the latter, I think it's more of an abstraction because there's less of a correlation between having to do things temporally rather than doing things spatially. Music can be spatial as well in terms of production--using reverbs as a way to place things on the z-axis for a sense of distance, for example.

In some version of the Metaverse in the future (I'm still very cynical about it), there will be some possibilities for thinking more visually about music in terms of creating a space for music and where it's placed within a room. On several songs on the Music for Photographs album, I created cinematic treatments where I would place the song itself in, say it was being played on a transistor radio in some part of the room, I'd calculate room reverb for that effect. That's a cliche too, but it's a way to think about music in a place.

The surround-sound productions have gotten so much better and I think there are a lot of possibilities where you can play music on the periphery or mix it and master it in such a way that it has a spatiality to it. It's not only temporal.