Perceptual Correspondences of Abstract Animation and Synthetic Sound

I started to be interested in ‘musique concrete’ and electronic music in 1974. In 1975, I began to study electronic music at the Conservatory of Milan. My music compositions since then have been conceived together with images. At first, in order to have a visual counterpart, I used simple tools such as slides and lights, but soon realized that a dynamic medium would be necessary to match the time-based structure of music. Therefore, I decided to paint a Super8-mm film by hand: I exposed a blank film to light without a camera and painted the transparent result with different inks. The final film was a very fast sequence of spots changing colors and shapes. The film was then coupled with a soundtrack containing a similar sequence of events. Even though there was not a one-to-one correlation between the audio and visual events, the effect was striking and successful.