This audio-visual piece is based on John Cage’s seminal text The Future of Music – Credo which he first delivered as early as 1937 and was published in 1958. He formulates his idea of noise as an element of contemporary music and furthermore postulates the use of electrical instruments which will allow for creating all sounds that can be heard and this being the base of creating music which will explore the entire field of sound.
Cage’s prospective description of a music that has since come to life is being used as a canvas for this piece but also defines the artistic space in which it operates. The sound is being projected onto this canvas and into this space, visualizing the spectrum of frequencies that appear in a piece of noise music, created by electrical instruments and exploring a wide field of sound.
“I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film, and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored. Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds. The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer who will be faced with the entire field of sound.”
The visual was created using Processing 4.x. All programming, editing and music by Bernhard Loibner.