MuViz - Visualization Notes
An essay by Joel Ryan in the context of the "Mapping Your Creative Territory" masterclass.
Though I have seldom surrendered to the desire to visualize
music, the opportunities emerging from computational graphics
are difficult to resist. My own audio autism has been pretty
water tight, sustained by a belief in the uniqueness of
musical experience. Probably this phenomenological monism
is just another version of the idea of "absolute" music,
but I do not think it is so much dogma as desire - a desire
to create compelling music. The horror of visualization
is partly avoidance of the "extra musical", but there is
also a real fear of the dominance of one mode of experience
over the other. While always involving some visual references,
musical instrument design, for me, seems to be all about
trying not to clutter up the interface with visual tasks
which crowd out listening. In my experience, this competition
between modalities does not hold between touch and listening.
Difficult bodily involvement with playing don't seem to
interfere with concentration on sound, perhaps the opposite.
It could be that competition for mental resources is the
problem, ie vision stealing from the power of other kinds
of "imagination" at work in playing music. Or perhaps it's
simply that the timing involved in decoding some kinds of
visual material is incongruent with the time required to
focus on a musical performance. But, whatever the
answer, there is a place where visual imagination can play
a strong role in music. I spend a lot of time visualizing
when "composing" and writing musical code: visualizing models
of the flow of musical sounds and models of processing,
visualizing hierarchies and relationships of musical parameters
and of DSP control structures. These include both mechanical
and iconographic images: images of physicalistic "processes"
as well as mathematical abstractions, though, for a programmer
this distinction is moot. Interestingly, this visualization
is spread out over external and internal mental forms, realized
partly on pieces of paper and partly via the power of imagination
in the traditional sense. Computational geometry
offers a rival locus for visual imagination. All branches
of science now depend for their everyday work on synthetic
graphic constructions. These are not pretty pictures, but
simulations and CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems, which
are built up directly out of the research methodology they
have come to aid. They include strong visual representations
of empirical data, and pattern recognition tools which incorporate
theoretical constructs of their science. They are not artificial
intelligence, but they are indispensable instruments of
research. In a very real way, understanding the folding
of proteins and mapping and manipulating the relations of
genomes are impossible without chemical CAD tools. Mathematical
ideas themselves are more easily communicated and elucidated
via graphic simulation. In fact, the very nature of scientific
rhetoric itself is changing, so that proof "by construction"
is once more mathematically valid. These systems have drawn
so close to the "language of science" that we now trust
in simulations to search for the solution to both pure theoretical
and more practical problems, as in cosmology, meteorology
and geophysics. This convergence of simulation and imagination
will probably be as empowering for our time as was the discovery
that the syntax of algebra enables extension of the idea
it represents. Considering that the distinction
between real and simulated makes little sense in the arts,
there is curiously little enthusiasm in art music for the
possibilities it offers for new theoretical tools for music.
In the academy the material basis of music was undermined
generations ago in favor of an idealized concept of writing.
As a believer in the fundamental ground of all music in
performance practice, in human players and their history,
I don't feel threatened by revisions due to our tools. But,
though there is definitely more than curiosity in the colorful
fringes of musicology, there is a strange silence in the
rest of the academy. Excerpt by Joel Ryan, 2002
