// Dennis Miller is on the Music faculty of Northeastern University in Boston where he heads the Music Technology program. His mixed media works, which reflect the application of principles drawn from music composition into the visual realm, have been presented at numerous venues throughout the world, most recently, Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Graphite 2006 Festival (Kuala Lumpur), Images du Nouveau Monde, CynetArts, Sonic Circuits, the Cuban International Festival of Music, Magmart | International Festival of VideoArt (Naples, IT), and the Gijon International Festival of Video Art, Gijon, Spain. His work was also presented at the gala opening of the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles and at SIGGRAPH 2006 in both the Animation Theatre and the Art Gallery. His work is cited in recent publications including Sonic Graphics: Seeing Sound (Rizzoli Books) and Art in the Digital Age (Thames and Hudson).
Artist’s Statement Multimedia artworks, i.e., those that combine images and music, have become commonplace in today’s culture, yet few of them strive for a balance of the media they contain. One can find numerous works that employ images generated by skilled animators and videographers that use music in only a secondary fashion. Such works often add music as an afterthought, and typically, it does not appear that their creators have tried to place the images and music on an equal footing.
Other multimedia works include a fully realized musical soundtrack with images that are generated automatically or by tying some aspect of the music to the pictures: as the sound gets louder, the images get brighter; or as the pitch rises, the images recede into the distance. In neither of these cases do the two media remain autonomous, nor are they allowed to developed compositional ideas independently. Moreover, such works are not typically the efforts of a composer and animator working in collaboration.
My goal as a mixed-media artist is to create works in which the music and visual images share a common dialectic. I identify compositional processes that apply to both the music and pictures and thereby attempt to create a unified work that provides a satisfying aesthetic experience in both the visual and aural domains. Typically, I create both the music and animation at the same time, which helps insure that neither predominates.
Miller’s music and artworks are available at
Animation by Dennis Miller. Sound by Dennis Miller.
"Cross Contours" originally is an audio-visual work by Dennis H. Miller. Here it is with a new sound-track. Thanks to Dennis H. Miller for allowing me to post his visuals with my music! Visuals: Dennis H. Miller / Music: Thilo Schaller
