Immersive visual music: how contemporary visual music practices have evolved and how immersive technologies can be employed to compose visual music works

This thesis explores contemporary visual music and its evolution. It addresses recent trends and explores audio-visual relationships, practices, and aesthetics. Visual music has a long tradition of negating representational elements in relation to sound, image, and space, to the degree that the term is often used interchangeably with abstract animation and absolute film. In recent years, immersive experiences have become more prevalent as an aesthetic tendency in art practices and media. This shift towards representation, reality, interactivity, simulation, and immersion has often been directed by new and available technologies. The research presented here investigates how immersive technologies can be employed effectively to compose visual music artwork and explores whether the shift to immersive technologies that seem to naturally emphasise representation is likely to raise a challenge regarding the traditional abstraction of visual music. This study consists of both practice and qualitative research. The literature and contemporary practice review investigate visual music's evolution and current field by discussing key theories and practices. This investigation includes identifying image and sound-making techniques, technologies and media that can be experimented with in the immersive visual music practice. Supplementary interviews conducted with experts in the field of visual music provided important insights into the process, tools and methodologies used in contemporary visual music. The data extracted from these interviews and their analysis played a significant role in the creation of a new framework of visual music classifications, which is part of my contribution to the field. The insights, when compared with the secondary research, identified gaps or less explored areas in the visual music practice and guided the direction of my visual music practice submitted for this thesis. This practice involves experimenting with immersive technologies and representational aesthetics. A series of experiments were conducted to explore different technologies and practices identified in the research on producing immersive visual music. By observing and comparing the experiments, several principles of effective practice were proposed. A final piece incorporating these principles was produced to demonstrate how immersive technologies can be effectively employed in creating immersive visual music.

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