John Whitney and Digital Harmony

I attended the opening of the Visual Music exhibit at the Hirshhorn last summer. While it was much more visual than music, some of the videos were interesting. I've been looking around since then on the web (and in libraries) for examples of these - especially John Whitney's work.



Now, thanks to Jim Bumgardner, there is at least a small example of Whitney's ideas from his book Digital Harmony. Bumgardner's online animation matches simple MIDI sounds with circulating dots. As each dot passes a line drawn on the animation, a sound is produced. Since the rotations of these dots are mathematically related, they can be seen as a visual representation of these same relationships in sound. I let the animation run for nearly a half an hour - it is neat!

Thanks to Information Aesthetics