The ArtsSync Project: Methods and Architectures for Mapping Foreground, Middle-ground and Background Musical Structures to Visual Images

In the growing trend towards the extension of computer music to include computer graphics several primary issues become immediately clear: A) how exactly and on what level(s) to correlate the audio and graphical elements, b) the limitations inherent in the vast majority of easy-to-use software for this aim, and c) the amount of time and technical competence required to master the more low level programming environments towards this aim. This paper focuses on these issues and how they are addressed in the "ArtsSync Project", an extensible environment for correlating audio and graphical components of multi-media projects. Its primary emphasis addresses the problems of mapping different graphical elements to different layers of musical structures, achieving the immediate moment-to-moment excitation of images while simultaneously allowing global parameters to map to medium and longer timescale structural levels of a particular composition.