This video is a piece of pure visual music: a synchronous visual and musical canon. I don't look for a correspondence between tone and color -- that's too reductionist. The correspondence I make is on a the level of a musical and visual gesture. "Canon" is my first proof of this visual music theory, of how this correspondence can work. Each musical phrase corresponds to a visual movement: in this case, a filling of the visual plane with a color. The color fields are flat, corresponding to an unadorned melody, and the animated transitions give a visual form to the musical form. The animation is offset in time and composited atop itself to create a visual analog to a musical canon. Each visual layer fills the plane just as each musical tone of each voice is heard. Harmony of counterpoint is achieved visually with these overlapping layers. Is this what chords look like? Perhaps only under this method of visualizing music. I know that many have tried to formulate a strict mapping of image to sound, but I refuse to develop or use a literal system of correspondence between sound and image. Instead, I try to match the style and movement of the image and sound in a more intuitive fashion.

-John Adamczyk

View Canon (XviD avi, 19Mb)

click here to get the XviD codec that you need to view this movie