A Carnal Formula: Music, painting and the creative process by Matthew Noone

How do a painter and a musician make work together? What elements of creative process are shared between music and the visual arts? And perhaps more interestingly, what are the divergences? This exposition focuses on an artistic residency in the Burren College of Art as a case study exploring theoretical frameworks for making and perceiving music and sound. It uses my own creative process moving between composing and print making as a dialogue between different forms of perception. Drawing upon phenomenology and deconstructionism, this exposition argues that aesthetic responses are paradoxical, in that both painting and music can touch a pre-cognitive body based knowing yet at the same time there is no absolute meaning. This conundrum is equated with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a ‘carnal formula’ and I attempt to extrapolate this idea through outlining my creative processes.

Artistic research has much to offer in gaining insight into creative process across disciplines. This can be beneficial not just in a practical manner for future collaborations but also in gaining insight into human perception by reflecting on how creative process works. In this exposition I have focussed on the creative process in a collaboration between a painter and a musician. I was not simply interested in the artistic outcome of the work but also in understanding how music and painting use different levels of perception. While the nature of collaboration is to find ways around or between these differences, theoretically I am interested in further exploring how our sense of sight and our sense of sound influence our understanding of the world through art. One significant point of interest is the way we can filter our perception through sight more easily than through sound. As Murray Schaefer describes, ‘the ears have no lids’. Hearing is a very primal sense which is directly linked to our sense of safety. It is hard to escape sound, while one can close their eyes. Another point of departure for future investigation is the temporal quality of sound. As CHUCK designer Ge Wang describes, ‘without the passage of time there would be no sound’. One could argue that visual art is also time dependent, as is all reality, yet the difference between these qualities is significant.

In this exposition, while I can identify some parralels in the creative process between painting and music (such as imrpovisation and 'taking a line for walk'), these parraelels are perhaps only useful as artistic inspiration rather than examples of homogenous practice. Further practice based research needs to be undertaken to illuminate more detail in the similarities and differences between music and painting. This exposition is an initial opening or awakening in that direction.

I Sleep But my Heart Wakes:

Reflections & Directions

'without the passage of time there would be no sound' (Ge Wang)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derek Bailey,Improvisation: Its nature and practice in music. (Da Capo Press, 1993).

Jacques Derrida,"The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod." (Chicago and, 1985).

Kapur, Ajay, et al. Programming for musicians and digital artists: Creating music with ChucK. Manning Publications Co., 2015.

Murray Schaefer, "Open ears." The auditory culture reader(2003): 25-39.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Eye and mind." Images: A Reader(1945).

Wang, Ge, and Perry R. Cook. "ChucK: A Concurrent, On-the-Fly, Audio Programming Language." ICMC. 2003.

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