My computer has to go back to Apple. Again. This time the problem is a little less dire � my optical drive motor is fried. I don�t understand why this should be so, as I hardly ever use the thing. But I�ll be computerless for a few days again, as soon as I get around to setting up a pickup. AJ and I spent an hour hanging out at the Apple store before we received the bad news. Lucky for AJ, they had a number of kid-height computers set up where he could play games. We tried a number of different things, but our favorite was a music program called Making Music (you can play around with some elements of the program here.

The program is attributed and endorsed by Morton Subotnick, a well-known composer and a pioneer in the field of electronic music and for the last 30 years or so a professor at the Californian Institute of the Arts. I first became aware of Subotnick�s work in high school, thanks to an English teacher who had an interest in contemporary American music and avant-garde film � two things that meet in the work of Subotnick, who frequently harnesses multiple media forms in the same work.

I know nothing of Subotnick as a person, other than that he�s married to Joan La Barbera, a singer known for 20th century pyrotechnics and a composer in her own right. But based on my experience with his music, which can be very complex, he wouldn�t be the first person I�d think of to write kid-friendly music software. But this program looked marvelous, at least in the few minutes we played with it. It harnessed techniques of making visual art on computers that are commonly found on kids programs and used them to introduce kids to the building blocks of music making. One game had children moving birds around a swath of telephone wires. Putting them closer together or farther apart changed the duration. Putting them on higher or lower lines changed the pitch. Another associates a different color with each of several instruments. The children can draw on the page and then play their artworks as sound. The variety and density of colors translate as orchestration, the height of the lines as pitch and the spacing of the gestures as rhythm.

The notion of translating the visual into the aural has always interested me, probably because I have a tendency to experience synesthesia � music is quite literally a visual as well as aural experience for me. It�s what attracted me to working in electronic music while I was in college. I�ve since left it behind, as the technology I loved working with, already old then, is positively ancient now. I loved building sounds out of sine waves with the Moog. And I loved tape manipulation (there was an article in the NY Times this week about how one of the last manufacturers of studio-quality audio tape has gone under). Both of these activities have highly visual aspects, the former by using an oscillascope and the latter by the measuring and splicing of the tape. I�ve also always been interested in projects that specifically attempt to present the music as a visual. I�ve been fascinated by Medieval attributions of architectural skill to musicians based solely on their musical talent � one of the architects of Cluny cathedral, for instance, was hired based solely on his musical talent which was assumed would qualify him for building design. (This seriously dates Goethe�s description of architecture as frozen music). Today�s NY Times, for example, had an article on The Symphony House, which drew its inspiration from a squeaky screen door, includes instruments as part of its structure and. There are other types of artwork, of course. I think I�ve written here previously about Tod Machover and Marvin Minsky�s Brain Opera. Other examples from a variety of viewpoints include the silent abstract animated film Ballet M�canique, by Ferdinand L�ger, where the film splices take their timing from a musical work of the same name by George Antheil.

Why is the fusion of art forms so appealing? I think it may depend on the situation. Sometimes it may be to harness the qualities in each that the other cannot offer. Sometimes I think it�s a sense that all art is trying to accomplish the same fundamental thing. It is trying to explain the divinely inexplicable. Perhaps two art forms working together offer a slightly wider sliver of truth, much like the discovery of fractals in disparate aspects of the world around us. In any case, AJ, who has not yet reached the age of reasoned philosophical musings was taken with the elemental mix in Making Music. After striping a page with different instrumental colors and pushing a button, he cried, �Mommy! Look at the pretty music!�

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