CompArts Week 17

Hey there followers! Hope everybody’s keeping well

Week 17. It’s really flying by! This week our lecture was about Computation and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) & New Materialism.

Preeeetttty dense if I’m being honest. I’m really glad that Mattia drew parallels between Object Oriented Ontology to Object Oriented Programming — it was really helpful as a way of grasping what feels suuuuper abstract to me, by relating it to something that I understand so factually in a logical and mathematical way. Still though…preeeetttyyy dense.

I’ve been kicking on with the research project though, and it’s proper interesting! I’m really interested in the different ways through history that people have attempted to Visualise Music. Such a fascinating topic, I’m really glad I’ve chosen it. Something that I’ve found incredibly beautiful is the “Clavilux”.

The Clavilux was a mechanical invention by Thomas Wilfred back in 1919, which allowed him to perform “Lumia” — a term he coined for “Light Art”. It’s actually closer to a rudimentary lighting desk, but it was thought of at the time as “Visual Music”.

Something else I found (skipping forward several decades) was the Atari Video Music (pictured above, and at the top of the blog). It was designed by Atari as an addition to the Home Hi-Fi back in 1977. It was the earliest commercial electronic music visualizer released. Obviously, quite limited in what it can do, and wasn’t very popular at the time — still very cool though! Below is a demo of it in action!

So yes, I’m really enjoying my topic so far, and marvelling at all this dope stuff from history times and different approaches to Visualising Music! What a joy.

Short and sweet this week, with just some tasters of the research project popping up (I’ll definitely be talking about both of these things!), so…that’s it for now. Laters x