UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates how music compositional techniques can inform and shape visual composition across disciplines, with a particular focus on visual music. While multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity have become prominent in contemporary art practice, the creative methodologies often reflect the artist's primary disciplinary background. This research explores how structural and semantic principles from music can be translated into visual art, proposing a framework that deepens our understanding of sound-image relations and supports cross-disciplinary creation. Although the point of departure is a composer's perspective, translating musical aesthetics and technique into visual form, the underlying connections are formulated so that they can operate in both directions between sound and image. Part I reviews the historical development of these relations, from the proportional theories of Pythagoras and Aristotle, through Castel's ocular harpsichord, Chladni's sound patterns, and Rimington's color organ, to Kandinsky's synesthetic explorations and the abstract visual experiments of early 20th-century pioneers such as Survage. Part II analyzes and connects compositional approaches and analytical concepts from the fields of electroacoustic music, soundscape studies, and audiovisual theory. These include traditional tape music techniques; the interplay between syntactic structure and semantic discourse; counterpoint; spatialization; Pierre Schaeffer's sound objects, TARTYP1, and reduced listening; Denis Smalley's gesture, texture, surrogacy, and source-bonding; R. Murray Schafer's signal, keynote, soundmark, and symbol; François Bayle's image-of-sound; Simon Emmerson's Language Grid; Michel Chion's synchresis and added value; and Myriam Boucher and Jean Piché's audiovisual object categorization. By synthesizing these theoretical perspectives, the research proposes a methodology for translating musical compositional concepts into the visual domain, offering a shared creative language between disciplines. As a result, the same schemas and mappings can support not only music-to-visual workflows but also visual-to-music composition for readers coming from the visual arts. The practical proposals are synthesized in three working diagrams: SCOPE (Semantic-Context & Perception), GRAIN (Gesture/texture-Reality-Intrinsic), and CROSS (Common Referential Ontology of Sound & Sight), which together provide a concise design surface and analytic vocabulary. Each diagram functions dually as an analytic and a compositional tool: they enable post-hoc reading of audiovisual relations and, prospectively, guide concrete design decisions during creation. An original audiovisual work, Shadows, serves as a case study in cross-modal composition, demonstrating a pipeline from musical parameters to visual parameters and onward to coherent audiovisual relations. The contribution is a composer-centric framework, historically grounded yet practice-oriented, that offers transferable taxonomies, mapping strategies, and design tools for cross-modal creation that are teachable, repeatable, and expressive. The study concludes that adapting music compositional principles to visual art not only enriches visual music but also offers a transferable framework for fostering transdisciplinary creativity across all artistic fields. Beyond visual music, these tools may help shed light on more general transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary methods, suggesting ways other artistic fields might translate their own aesthetics and materials across media.