Composing Holochoric Visual Music: Interdisciplinary Matrices

With a lineage originating in the days of silent films, visual music, in its current incarnation, is a relatively recent phenomenon when compared to an historically broad field of creative expression. Today it is a time-based audio/visual territory explored and mined by a handful of visual and musical artists. However, an extensive examination of the literature indicates that few of these composers have delved into the associable areas of merging virtual holography and holophony toward visual music composition. It is posited here that such an approach is extremely rich with novel expressive potential and simultaneously with numerous novel challenges. The goal of this study is, through praxis, to instantiate and document an initial exploration into the implementation of holochory toward the creation of visual music compositions.

Obviously, engaging holochoric visual music as a means of artistic expression requires an interdisciplinary pipeline. Certainly, this is demonstrated in merging music and visual art into a cohesive form, which is the basis of visual music composition. However, in this study is revealed another form of interdisciplinarity. A major challenge resides with the development of the means to efficiently render the high-resolution stereoscopic images intrinsic to the animation of virtual holograms. Though rendering is a challenge consistent with creating digital animations in general, here the challenge is further exacerbated by the extensive use of multiple reflections and refractions to create complexity from relatively simple geometric objects. This reveals that, with the level of computational technology currently available, the implementation of high-performance computing is the optimal approach.

Unifying such diverse areas as music, visual art, and computer science toward a common artistic medium necessitates a methodological approach in which the interdependency between each facet is recognized and engaged. Ultimately, a quadrilateral reciprocative feedback loop, involving the composer's sensibilities in addition to each of the other facets of the compositional process, must be realized in order to facilitate a cohesive methodology leading toward viability.

This dissertation provides documentation of methodologies and ideologies undertaken in an initial foray into creating holochoric visual music compositions. Interlaced matrices of contextualization are intended to disseminate the processes involved in deference to composers who will inevitably follow in the wake of this research. Accomplishing such a goal is a quintessential aspect of practice-based research, through which new knowledge is gained during the act of creating. Rather than formulating theoretical perspectives, it is through the praxis of composing holochoric visual music that the constantly arising challenges are recognized, analyzed, and subsequently addressed and resolved in order to ensure progression in the compositional process. Though measuring the success of the resultant compositions is indeed a subjective endeavor, as is the case with all art, the means by which they are achieved is not. The development of such pipelines and processes, and their implementation in practice, are the basic building blocks of further exploration, discovery, and artistic expression. This is the impetus for this document and for my constantly evolving and progressing trajectory as a scholar, artist, composer, and computer scientist.