A film score is written for pictures that already exist. A music video is cut to a song that is already finished. Audio visual art starts from a different idea: that sound and image can be composed together, as one work, with neither serving the other.
That idea is older than electricity. It runs from eighteenth-century colour keyboards through hand-drawn film soundtracks to the vast data projections of today's media art festivals.
Here is what the term covers, where the practice comes from, who shaped it, and how artists and researchers can approach it now.
What audio visual art actually means
In the narrow sense, audiovisual art is moving abstract imagery and music or sound set in deliberate relation to each other. It includes visual music films, live audiovisual performance and immersive installations.
The key word is relation. A slide show with background music is not really audiovisual art, because the two layers could be swapped for others without changing much.
In stronger work, image and sound grow out of the same decisions. A change in rhythm is also a change in light, and a burst of noise is also a burst of pixels.
Some artists generate both from a single source, such as a piece of code, a data set or an electrical signal. Others work by hand and by ear, matching every cut to a beat with obsessive care.
Colour organs and the dream of visible music
Long before cinema, inventors tried to build instruments that played light the way a harpsichord plays notes. In 1725 the French Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel proposed an "ocular harpsichord" that would show colours as its keys were struck.
Others followed with colour organs of their own. In 1893 the British painter Alexander Wallace Rimington invented one that attracted a great deal of attention.
The Nordic connection arrives early. In 1916 the Russian painter Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné premiered his Optophonic Piano at a solo exhibition in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called.
Thomas Wilfred, born in Næstved, Denmark, in 1889, took the idea furthest. His Clavilux instruments projected slowly moving forms of coloured light, and the first public recital took place in New York in 1922.
Wilfred called this art "lumia", and he insisted it should be silent. That makes him a useful reminder that visual music does not always need actual sound; sometimes the music lies in the structure of the image.
The Museum of Modern Art kept his Lumia Suite, Opus 158 on view from 1964 until 1980, and many artists of the psychedelic era started working with light after seeing it.
Visual music on film
Film gave artists precise control over time. From the late 1920s onward, a handful of animators used it to compose image and sound as a single score.
Oskar Fischinger, a German animator who later settled in the United States, made more than 50 short films of abstract shapes moving to music. His Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) is now listed on the US National Film Registry.
Mary Ellen Bute made fourteen short abstract musical films in New York between 1934 and 1958. Several belonged to her series Seeing Sound, and many were shown in ordinary cinemas such as Radio City Music Hall before the main feature.
In California, the brothers John and James Whitney made Five Film Exercises in the first half of the 1940s. John later built an animation machine from a converted wartime anti-aircraft gun director and became one of the pioneers of computer animation.
Norman McLaren at the National Film Board of Canada went furthest in fusing the two senses. For Synchromy (1971) he photographed cards printed with lines onto the film's optical soundtrack to produce notes and chords.
He then printed the same shapes, in colour, on the picture itself. What you see on screen is, quite literally, what you hear.
Video, signals and an Icelandic violinist
When portable video arrived in the late 1960s, artists found that sound and image could share the same electrical signal. One of the central figures in that story is Icelandic.
Steina Vasulka was born in Reykjavík in 1940 and trained as a classical violinist, playing in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. With her husband Woody Vasulka she moved to New York, and in 1971 the couple founded The Kitchen, a space for video, music and performance.
Her series Violin Power (1970–78) shows her playing the violin while the sound is routed into video equipment and bends the image of her playing. The instrument becomes a way of drawing with signal.
In 2014 the National Gallery of Iceland opened the Vasulka Chamber, after the couple donated a substantial part of their digital archive to the museum.
Noise, data and the contemporary scene
Today the best-known audio artists working with image tend to treat sound in its rawest forms. The Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, who lives and works in Paris, builds pieces from sine tones and noise, often at frequencies near the edges of human hearing.
His installations pair those sounds with dense projections of numbers, grids and flickering black-and-white fields. The photograph at the top of this page shows his Data.tron at the transmediale festival in Berlin in 2010.
Work like this is sometimes described as white noise art, and the label is fair up to a point. Noise is the raw material, but the results are tightly structured and synchronised to the frame.
Ikeda's matrix won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2001, and in 2014 he began a residency at CERN. In Sweden, his work appeared in the group show Entangle / Physics and the Artistic Imagination at Bildmuseet in Umeå in 2018–19.
He has also worked with the German artist Carsten Nicolai, who records as Alva Noto, under the shared name Cyclo.
Why it belongs in artistic research
Audio visual art raises questions that are hard to answer in writing alone. How does a rhythm change the way we read an image? When does a sound make a picture feel larger, closer or less stable?
Practice-based research lets artists test those questions directly, by building a work and watching what happens in the room. It sits naturally alongside the listening-based work we describe in our piece on sound art as artistic research in Nordic institutions.
It also connects to older traditions of translating between the senses. Our guide to sound drawings looks at artists who record what they hear on paper rather than on screen.
One caution is worth keeping in mind. Visual music is often described as synaesthesia, but historically the two are separate ideas. Most artists in this field compose relationships between sound and image; they are not reporting a neurological condition.
Documenting work that only exists in time
The hardest part of researching audiovisual work is often keeping a record of it. A live performance or installation depends on the room, the speakers, the projector and the timing between them.
A single video file rarely captures that. Researchers usually combine recordings from several angles, the original audio, technical riders and notes on the space.
Wilfred's case shows the risk. He objected to recording lumia on film, so his works survive only as long as his machines do, and only about thirty-five Clavilux Jr. units and lumia compositions are known to exist today.
For practical approaches, see our overview of research documentation tools artists actually use, many of which work well for time-based media.
How to start looking and listening
If you are new to the field, begin with the historical films. Many have been preserved by archives such as the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, and McLaren's Synchromy is worth watching with headphones to notice how exactly each shape matches its tone.
Then see a live audiovisual performance or a large installation if you can. Pay attention to what the space does: how bass moves through the floor, and how the image shifts your sense of where a sound is coming from.
Finally, try a small experiment of your own. Pair one simple sound with one simple moving image, and change only one thing at a time.
Artistic sound and image affect each other in ways that are far easier to feel than to predict. That gap between expectation and experience is exactly where this kind of work, and research into it, begins.
Cover photo: Ryoji Ikeda's Data.tron [8K enhanced version] at transmediale 10 in Berlin. Photo by Shervinafshar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.