Music in painting : painting in music / Valerie Ross and Ayse Guler

The transformative qualities of music and painting are inspirational. The collaborative voices of artistes from different disciplines and backgrounds transcend geographic and cultural distances enabling transcultural creativities as an outcome of interdisciplinary research-practice. This interdisciplinary project represents a unique collaborative effort between a composer and an artist in creating, visualizing and translating sound. It extrapolates the process and product of sonic design in response to a set of watercolor paintings drawn by Turkish painter and academic, Ayse Guler who was inspired by the music of Valerie Ross. The striking visual and interpretation of sound through Zen philosophy, a/r/tography and novel watercolour painting techniques adopted in the paintings have triggered a musical response from the composer who in-turn transmogrified the paintings back into music. The composer aimed to (re)interpret and translate the colours, shapes and emotions of the paintings as sonic realms in the performative world where sound-forms, sights and senses meld into a smorgasbord of artistic communication through a new electroacoustic piece entitled ‘Sixty-Three
Dimensions’.