My head is so wrapped up in my PGPD and MADA2 essays that things seem to be feeding back into it. This week I saw Charles Atlas and Antony & the Johnsons perform ‘Turning’ at the Barbican. A beautiful interpretation of emotion through sound and sight. Vocal and acoustic music composed by Antony & the Johnsons (some songs from his albums, rearranged and some new material) very much composed and arranged rather than improvised. There is one model per song rotating on a turntable onstage while being filmed by 2 static cameras. The framing is only of the face and shoulders. Charles Atlas then takes this live footage and mixes between the 2 sources as well as taking sections and processing them digitally. I assume that he is using VJAMM or some equivalent. The first time the model looks directly at the camera is very powerful, indeed it is as if the whole audience gasps. The humanity of the subject (that becomes the art object) being so large in scale and close up feels very personal. The models were told not to ‘act’ but to think inwardly and be themselves.

I've been researching the relationship between colour and the musical scale. It's a dubious subjective link really.
It was first discussed by Pythagorus ancient Greek philisophers then again in the 1700s by Castel when the ocular harsichord was built. In the 20th century Scriabin composed music with a 'light score' above the music.

In 1938 Charles Blanc-Gatti made an animated film interpretation of the link between colour and the musical scale called Chromophonie

The Photophonic Experiment by Pram, Project Dark and Bliss Body at the MAC in Birmingham was an audio-visual spectacular.
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/aboutus/project_detail.php?sid=1&id=439&page=8
The three groups had custom built musical instruments that created sound by light or electricity. The artists would point lights at screens and there would be a resulting noise (photo-synth). Another machine would spark and the sound would be amplified in differing lengths of tubes to create different pitches (spark-o-phone). There was a theramin player too. This instrument suited the noisy nature of the experiments as it has a complete range (glissando) of frequencies unlike a keyboard that is restricted to a tonal scale. The overall balance of the evening’s music was half noise and half music. This worked very well. It never strayed too long into abstract noise before a ‘musical’ element brought cohesion to the audio chaos. I have been thinking a lot about the difference between noise and music and I think the difference is structure and organisation. A 10k test tone in a studio is 'noise' whereas when it is combined with other instruments and played on varispeed in John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No.1 it is 'music'. Only in my opinion of course, these things are rather subjective.

I’ve been researching John Cage for my PGPD essay and have been delighted by his outrageously experimental scores of the late 1950s. Winter Music (1957) and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-8) have very abstract scores with unconventional musical notations. These clusters or lines have specific instructions or rules attached to them but can be interpreted by the performer quite openly. This use of notation to inspire various readings is in direct contrast to traditional Western music notation, which represents a direct representation of sound.
This relates to my project where I’m highlighting the options of different readings of gesture using music. Music can be ‘read’ by the listener in many ways, it is subjective and open, however Western musical notation is a strict language with little space for vagueries and interpretation, except for in the ‘feeling’ or ‘mood’ or tempo. Gestures can also be ‘read’ in many ways.