ABSTRACT
The Electroacoustic community has treasured, and on some occasions pioneered, technological advances in electronic and digital media and tools. As the enabling technologies for creative work with digital audio now reside on the same computers as those used for video applications, composers have the, relatively affordable, opportunity to ‘connect’ these two digital media in their creative endeavors. Despite the facilitating role of software interfaces and the inheritance of past experiences in mapping musical gestures to the moving image, the inherent difficulty of an interconnected audiovisual ‘idiom’ soon becomes apparent and represents a stimulating, yet daunting, challenge for audiences as well as composers of Electroacoustic Music.
New practices may seek to extend into the audiovisual domain the powerful and distinctive traits of a form of art that originally based itself, historically, culturally and aesthetically, on the primacy of the ear. The strategies adopted by this new breed of – sometimes self-taught – audiovisual composers are informed by their experiences as Electroacoustic composers, sound designers and sound artists, but their very actions also throw the acousmatic paradigm into question. We will leave the darkness of the concert room behind us and reflect upon works articulated through the combination of shifting audible and visible morphologies.
