Visual music

Today I was thinking about music, and the particular quality that music has of being rhythmic. It's interesting, because in a lot of other ways visual art and musical art share similar characteristics. Although visual art is often static and musical art is often dynamic, that's not necessarily the case; movies, for example, are dynamic visual art. However, even with that in mind, musical art is usually rhythmic and visual art is usually not, except when the two are used together.

But what would it look like if you could make non-audial music? Visual music? An animation that you watch that beats with a rhythm, dances and moves in front of you. It's obviously possible to convey emotion and mood visually, so you should be able to do a lot of what you can do with sound. You could have different instruments, as in animations that move according to specific rules. You would still have an energy and a tempo to play with, still be able to represent complex interactions between different instruments as they catch your attention or fade into the background.

In a way you might even have more flexibility, because our auditory senses are quite limited in discriminative ability. You could produce far more complex soundstages with no sound, because our ability to track complex visuals is so much better. There'd even be some spectacular possibilities in live performance, where you could have entire visual orchestras controlling individual instruments, being mixed and laid out in real time by a visual conductor. All of this in total silence – I wonder what it would be like.

Of course, sound and vision do have fundamentally different mechanics, and it's not clear that, for example, our sense of musical consonance would translate well into visual consonance. This visual music would probably have different rules to audial music and end up developing in a substantially different direction. But that's fine; visual music is more like a neat analogy, the point is finding out what you could create with rhythmic visuals.

Though maybe, if visual music ever got big enough, you could bring the two back together. Not like a music video now, where the visuals are really just a prop for the music, but where the video and the audio are their own separate rhythmic art pieces that come together to make something exceptional.