The pathway to music synthesis was illuminated by film.

So, last week, I featured a wicked-cool 3D visualization of the first movement of Bach's St Matthew Passion and it got me thinking: when did I first see sound visualized? I think it may have been the scene in Disney's Three Caballeros (1944) when Donald Duck gets sucked into an oscilloscope. Remember? No? Well:

 

 

I'm always so satisfied when I can see the sounds I'm hearing. The first time I felt really visually connected to sound was when I first saw Norman McLaren's Synchromy (1971). Watching it, you immediately connect aurally, but ocularly -- all of a sudden, the experience is heightened, made sensorially denser, doubly satisfying, even. Click on the title and you'll be redirected the NFB's website where you can watch a higher quality version than the one below for free. Forgive my lack of coding skills.

 

 

Now that you've watched it, you have to be thinking: did the sound or the picture come first?

So far as I can tell, the catalyst of the cult of synthetic sound began with a composition student of Taneyev's. Arseny Avraamov was among the first to write about the concept of synthesized sound: his train of thought began with a journey into the physical traces of sound in wax cylinders. He speculated that if these divots are simply sonic mirrors, what was stopping these divots from being carved by a hand? In time, he began painting them.

 

 

But how did they make these painted strips of paper make sound? One answer to that question came from Soviet animator/synthetic sound pioneer Evgeny Shlopo, inventor of the Variophone. Even Rimsky-Korsakov's nephew, Georgi, jumped on the Graphical Sound bandwagon. Behold, the magic of their collaborative efforts:

It was in the 1950s that the National Film Board of Canada commissioned Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart, and Maurice Blackburn to produce the first Canadian films using this technology. The series began with a primitive yet entertaining introduction to McLaren's techniques: Pen Point Percussion (1951).

 

 

Two years earlier, McLaren and Lambart were experimenting with painting sound in a much more interpretive way. Their legendary 1949 collaboration Begone Dull Care was a pastiche of visual ideas inspired by the music of an equally legendary Canadian jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, and his trio. Again, to watch these magical moments in Canadian film history in higher resolution, just click on the titles.

 

 

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