Music technology in multimedia

The application of music technology to multimedia is an exciting field for collaboration with game designers, film-makers, TV/video producers, web developers and others. Music technology owes more to film than it may seem at first. From the drawn-sound experiments (actually drawing directly on film then playing that back through an optical sensor) of the Russian experimental composers Evgenii Sholpo and Arsenii Avraamov to the investigations of Rudolf Pfenninger and Oskar Fischinger, the synthesis of sound through drawing on film is probably the first creative attempt to treat music as a plastic art; this is to say that once ‘moulded’, its shape will not change. Think about this for a moment: up until these experiments with optical sound, musical composition was essentially a `symbolic' art. Music notation stood in for sound, but now sound is able to represent itself. For sound artists drawing on film, electronic-music composers cutting and splicing tape, and performers documenting their playing, sound itself is an object.