Daniel o'toole

 Eye Music

Saint Cloche Gallery, Sydney Australia

22 Nov – 3 Dec 2023

This series unfolds the idea that sound may be translated into abstract visual systems, drawing upon the long tradition of graphic notation. The term eye music itself refers to a form of visual composition that dates back to the fifteenth century. One of the earliest known examples is Belle, bonne, sage by Renaissance composer Baude Cordier, written in the shape of a heart so that its form enriched the meaning of the music. Such experiments established a precedent for visualizing sound through symbolic or abstract means.

My works build on this lineage while also reflecting on the experimental traditions of indeterminacy pioneered by John Cage. By adapting forms drawn from conventional musical notation—grids, circles, and linear structures—I have developed a system of drawing that is at once playful and ordered. The process echoes the improvisatory nature of music while retaining an underlying sense of calm structure.

In these works, circles within circles are arranged across horizontal registers, suggesting the linear flow of musical time. Each circle functions as a harmonic unit, a cluster of frequencies interacting in relation to the others, so that the entire composition reads simultaneously as a pattern and as a field of organic relations.

The frosted acrylic screen, also central to my Chromatic Synthesis series, plays a crucial role here. It diffuses the edges of each hand-drawn circle, producing phantom hues in the intervals where colour rings overlap. These spectral tones behave like chords or clusters in music—sometimes resonant, sometimes dissonant—as adjacent frequencies collide and interact. In this way, Eye Music extends the chromatic investigations of Chromatic Synthesis into a visual language that parallels the harmonic and polyphonic structures of sound.

The Particle Plate: Chance, Materiality, and the Visual Language of Electronic Sound

The Particle Plate is an instrument designed to foreground play, chance, and materiality within the context of electronic music performance. Conceived as an extension of my sustained explorations into granular synthesis, the instrument emerged from a fascination with the unpredictable qualities of sound—qualities that persist even within the highly abstract processes of digital signal manipulation. While granular synthesis provides a framework for dissecting and reassembling audio into micro-events, its most compelling attribute lies in its capacity to produce unexpected rhythmic and tonal structures.

The initial conceptual prompt for the Particle Plate came from observing a video in which sand was poured over guitar strings, generating textures strikingly similar to those produced by granular algorithms. This gesture revealed a direct link between the physical behaviour of particulate matter and the sonic outcomes of digital fragmentation. In response, I began to explore how processes of pouring and scattering could themselves become performative methods for producing electronic sound.

In its operation, the Particle Plate employs gravity and chance as compositional agents. The dropping of rice, beans, or other small objects onto its surface removes a significant degree of performer control over rhythm and pitch. Instead, the rhythmic outcomes emerge stochastically, shaped by the unpredictable trajectories of falling particles. At the same time, pitch values are randomly selected within a system of quantisation that constrains them to a predetermined scale. This negotiation between chaos and structure creates a dynamic balance: at slower modulation rates, the system produces quasi-melodic patterns of ascending or descending pitches, while at higher rates, the sounds scatter into non-melodic, textural events.

Crucially, the Particle Plate also reintroduces embodied and visual dimensions to electronic music performance. Contemporary electronic music is often critiqued for its opacity, in which the correlation between gesture and sound is obscured by interfaces of buttons, screens, and flat control surfaces. By contrast, the Particle Plate establishes a direct visual link between action and sound: the audience sees the material impact of beans or grains on the plate at the same moment that they hear the resulting sonic event. This alignment mirrors the immediacy of acoustic performance—such as the strumming of a guitar—where cause and effect are both visually and aurally evident.

Beyond its performative novelty, the instrument resonates with broader concerns in my practice, particularly the exploration of natural systems and unpredictable processes. Much of my work seeks to expose the alchemy of time, gravity, light, sound, and space as interrelated forces that resist complete control. The Particle Plate extends this inquiry into the musical domain, positioning chance not as an obstacle to mastery but as an essential collaborator in the creation of sound.

By integrating tactile play, stochastic processes, and a legible visual language, the Particle Plate thus functions not only as a musical instrument but also as a conceptual framework for rethinking the accessibility and communicative potential of electronic music. It demystifies complex sound processes, translating them into physical gestures that are both intuitively grasped by audiences and capable of producing sophisticated sonic outcomes.