Advanced Studio: Visual Music

10 units · Undergraduate

Intermittent: 10 units Visual Music is an advanced studio course exploring relationships between sound, image, movement, and perception. Working across animation, moving image, sound, performance, installation, and computation, students will experiment with audiovisual practices that generate new forms of perception, participation, embodiment, and experience. Rather than treating visual music as a fixed genre or historical style, the course approaches it as an evolving field of practice. How might sound become visible? How might an image behave musically? What happens when rhythm becomes spatial, movement becomes signal, or computation mediates the relationship between seeing and hearing? How can audiovisual works produce experiences that exceed the synchronization of sound and image? Through a series of experimental studio projects, students will develop individual and collaborative approaches to audiovisual composition while engaging critically with historical and contemporary practices in visual music, expanded cinema, experimental animation, audiovisual performance, electronic and electroacoustic sound-making, generative art, and computational media. Projects may take the form of films, animations, performances, installations, projections, software-based works, or hybrid experiments. The course coincides with Meshwork, the Pittsburgh Visual Music Festival, connecting the studio to an international community of artists working across new media, sonic arts, animation, cinema, performance, installation, and computation. Students will engage with festival programs, exhibitions, performances, and visiting artists, bringing these encounters directly into their studio practices and research. The semester culminates in a public event, positioning the studio as both a laboratory for experimentation and a point of connection to the broader visual music community.