Check out a few of my favourite ideas, clips and music videos as starting points for exploring the relationship between visual art and music.

‘The Motorway’ blends dots and dabs of paint with clever film making techniques to really ‘paint the music’.

‘The Kandinsky Effect’ brings abstract painting to life.

 
 

Heather Hansen – Emptied Gestures

DEMILKED “New Orleans-based contemporary performance artist Heather Hansen’s work is the perfect union of dance and drawing. Her whole body moves in light and fluid dance-like motions and, just with little pieces of charcoal, she draws stunning one-of-a-kind symmetrical patterns and abstract forms on large sheets of paper.

The resulting drawings are beautiful, resembling the perfect geometrical forms we see in nature, but the creation process is what moves us the most. The paper is the meeting point of dance and drawing, but Hansen’s emotions and her unleashed artistic instincts, with unpredictable twists and turns, make it a performance to remember.” Read more on Demilked

Sound Uncovered

Here’s a lesson seed:  This app isn’t about visual art as such, but there are plenty of opportunities to engage with art making as you use the sounds and science here as stimulus for art.  We love the idea of merging sensory experiences with art-making, and this interactive app can be used to explore value, expression, the senses, perception, aesthetics, abstraction… all very pertinent visual art concepts.  Using the sounds as starting points for creating art work is also an exciting premise.

“This app is about sound, but it’s really about you.” By causing you to notice weird things about your perception that you usually take for granted, the Exploratorium forces you to think more critically about your environment.”

“I love “Find the Highest Note,” which presents a circular organ and demonstrates the mind-bending auditory Möbius strip known as the Shepard scale. As you move upward and downward in base pitch, the eerie Shepard tone’s partials replace each other at the top and bottom range of hearing. As a result, even though you’re moving up or down in pitch, it ultimately never sounds like it’s getting higher or lower. It’s the auditory version of the barber-pole illusion, where the corkscrewing shape seems to move upward or downward forever while remaining in the same place.”

What’s also cool about this exhibit in the app is that it doubles as a musical instrument.

Another great social exhibit is the “How Old Are Your Ears?” test, which lets you slide down from an inaudibly high frequency into the ranges that humans naturally lose the ability to hear over time. The younger people in the room will start to hear an ear-splitting whine, but the elders won’t hear a thing until lower down.  (source: www.readwrite.com)

Drawing a song – how many lesson seeds are there here?

Digital effects and images with music…a good classroom conversation starter here.

General Motors, Detroit, America from Anthony Burrill on Vimeo.

 
“Innovative directing duo Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth of Wriggles & Robins (previously) just released this great new music video for the band Travis. The team shot at below freezing temperatures and filmed projected animations that could only be seen when the four band members would breath through the cold air.” (source: thisiscolossal)

 …and go behind the scenes…

 
Watch this abandoned building transform into colour with street artists and a killer soundtrack…

The Ok Go Collection

We couldn’t forget ‘Ok Go’. The best. Here’s my favourite clips that bring art and music together.

Lastly, but not too seriously, ‘Step Up…the Art Gallery Dance Scene’. My class loves this (cringe!).

If you liked this post, check out this collection of amazing stop-frame animation clips for lots of inspiration.

And this is an inspiring reminder of the power of the arts…this time, music.