Visual Music: Imagining, Translating, Configuring / Visual music: Immaginare, Tradurre, Configurare

Music already has its visual. This is evident both in the performative moment, in the instrumental performance or in the stage representation, and in the ways of being written and annotated in the score. Why therefore make music visible in another way? The history of art and cinema documents a large production of visual works in which music is a source of inspiration, theme or compositional pretext, and even more the object of imitation. Artworks that are produced with the explicit intent of “making visual”, to provide visible solutions alternative to the traditional, able to urge the same mental images in the observer, the same emotions, induced by listening. As Walter Pater (1877) wrote, in a much-quoted expression: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. In visual music, this relationship between the arts is even closer; music is not only the subject of “aspiration” and is itself part of the artwork, it is also the “origin” of the visual. The visual configuration is the result of a process that starts from imagination, the mental image produced by listening, followed by a translation process defining the relationship between musical and visual, sometimes even a code, of a correspondence system, to reach towards the configuration, to give shape, color and kineticism to the visual imagery. Imagining, translating, and configuring are therefore the three main stages of visual music projects.