The Caspar Project: Mapping Visual Music on figurative landscape.
Landscape seems to mirror the phenomenology of music in the visible world.
Objectives and Goals.
The Caspar Project primary objective is the integration of two parallel formal systems:
[A] the sound world of music
[B] the visual world of figurative landscape.
The simultaneous perception of these two formal/aesthetic domains is part of the more general phenomenon of Synesthesia described in a vast literature in psychology, art theory and aesthetics (e.g. "Audition Coloree'", sense-perception exchange etc.).
The integration of system [A] and [B] aims at the amplification of the aesthetic experience of both.
It moves from the following premises:
• music -- as soundscape -- can be represented visually by athmospheric/orographic phenomena
• atmospheric/orographic events -- as visual counterpart -- can be, and have been, represented in music.
An aesthetic parallelism is found between system [A] and [B]:
[A] Tonal music expresses emotional dynamics through the "audible" construction of sound relationships, melodic and tonal structures, rythm and "tempo": musical constructions in constant movement.
[B] Figurative landscape expresses similar dynamics trough the presence and quasi-filmic unfolding of atmospheric and landscape structures: cloud formations, skies, terrains, water masses, all in constant change in their form and color due to the movement of the skies, the sun, and/or the observer (light chromatisms, relative scale and position, shadows/highlights).
The process of music-landscape integration overlays [A] on [B] by means of a series of "mapping equations".
It consists of the selection of a musical composition, its tonal, harmonic, time analysis and its mapping (transposition) on a virtual figurative landscape that represents it.
Figurative landscape forces formal and "behavioural" constraints on the dynamic elements representing visual music:
- compliance with the laws of gravity, fluid dynamics,
- athmospheric phenomena (condensation /evaporation)
- naturalistic effects of light and color
- naturalistic temporal frameworks -- night-day cycles, seasonal cycles etc.
Such constraints are described in the mapping equations and operate to keep the audiovisual composition as adherent as possible to primary reference i.e. figurative landscape.
Read more at https://visualmusic.gmvergani.com/sec_wivm.php?data-iframe=iframe_casparpro
Such method of interpretation is named "Caspar", in homage to Caspar David Friedrich: highest romantic painter who saw landscape as a representation of the inner self.
