Arts unravelled: How do you make music visual?

Sometimes, these performances take the form of audio-visual events, or an installation piece, pairing of music with a performance, or film, or lighting display. 

But how exactly do you make music visual? What does doing so involve? And how do you determine what form this audio-visual realisation should take? With the return of New Music Biennial to the Southbank Centre in July 2025 came the opportunity for us to find out the answer to these questions and more. Among the 20 performances that make up New Music Biennial are a number of audio-visual pieces, and we spoke to the proponents of three of them to help better understand their process.

Chisara Agor is the composer, producer, writer and performer behind Nocturnal Sun, an interdisciplinary project that blends classical, electronic, jazz, avant-garde and West African traditions with poetry and storytelling. Mark David Boden is the composer of Chasing Sunlight, an audio-visual concerto on the theme of migration written for Sinfonia Cymru and realised by Ratio Studios. And from Penumbra – an experimental work comprising voice and double bass improvisations in response to a score of video and lighting elements – we gained insight from all four collaborators; musicians Dali de Saint Paul and Maxwell Sterling and visual artists Rebecca Salvadori and Charlie Hope.

Why make music visual?

Before we get to the ‘how’, we should perhaps first look at the ‘why’. What is it that leads artists to decide that music alone isn’t quite right for the work they are creating? For Boden it comes from a want to ‘make performances as immersive, stimulating and thought-provoking as possible for audiences; the hope is that visuals will help audiences make a deeper connection with the ideas contained within the music’. 

With Penumbra, it was the expertise of the respective artists involved that determined this would be an audio-visual work, as De Saint Paul highlights.‘I think our first desire was to come together to create an installation that could unite our skills, each contributor of the project using what the others bring to give their own response to the collective process. I think we reach an effective expression in making our visuals musical or our music visual.’

For Agor and the works she creates, the two aspects – music and the visual – are similarly naturally entwined. ‘All my work comes from an inter-disciplinary impetus,’ she explains, ‘which means that in most cases I’m always thinking about music with visuals, music with colour, music with a particular movement. I think music holds memories, music attaches itself to visual matter and it sticks to it. That luckily comes naturally to me as part of my practice and training.’

What comes first?

So, if you’ve decided to create a piece that pairs music and visuals, where do you begin? With the music? With the visual aspect? With a combination of both? Well, with Boden, ‘the music always comes first. The concept I had for Chasing Sunlight in terms of narrative, shape and structure was clear before the visuals were developed. Ultimately, classical music audiences have come to hear a piece of music, and whilst I strongly believe that visual elements play a crucial role in live performance, the music must be strong to support any visual elements’.

Penumbra too began with the music, specifically a BBC Radio 3 Late Junction Session in 2023 when De Saint Paul and Sterling first began improvising together. That initial session led to the release of Penumbra a year later, and from there, at the suggestion of Al Cameron of the Outlands Network, it evolved yet again, with Salvadori and Hope’s involvement leading to it becoming a ‘sounds and images installation’. Although this particular project was music-led, that’s not necessarily each artist’s preferred approach, as Salvadori told us. ‘My desire is that of imagining compositional structures as horizontal conversations between the different elements and sensitivities involved, I try to challenge the thought of both music or image coming first and/or after’.

For Agor ‘the actual concept comes first’, although that is more often than not ‘wrapped up in visual storytelling’. And with a narrative-led piece such as Nocturnal Sun, ‘the visual representation in my mind takes me through the movements of the broader piece… with each visual realisation I can go further into the musical details, so a new direction in design could inspire new melodies and musical ideas. Music is an extension of the visual and conceptual world [created for the work], something that evolves out of it as a necessity, which means that we can separate the visual from the music, but each is embedded with meaning.

How do you decide what form the visual element takes?

As our original question – how do you make music visual? – presumed a music-first approach, let’s continue down that path; you’ve composed your music, you want it to make it more immersive with a visual dimension, what’s your next step? ‘The form of the visual accompaniment is largely dictated by the structure of the music,’ says Boden. Take Chasing Sunlight as an example, where the overall inspiration and narrative – for both music and visuals – was the 40,000-mile migration from pole to pole of the Arctic tern. The music composition ‘has a five-movement, circular form with each movement having its own programmatic connection to aspects of the bird’s migration’, that form is then replicated in the visual accompaniment, ‘the repetition of the material in movements one and five was intentional and important for creating a sense of the pole-to-pole migrations that the terns undertake’.

For a collective working together, this decision relies, as Salvadori says, on ‘a mix of intuition and trust. When the four of us came together to work on Penumbra there was a total openness’. Even though the music was already determined, through this openness came an opportunity to reimagine it; Salvadori again: ‘We decided to think of light and film as a score to which De Saint Paul and Sterling could interact with however they felt’.

Do the visuals need to be in sync with the music?

‘Not necessarily,’ says Boden, ‘largely because the music isn’t underscoring the visuals and isn’t designed to represent what is seen’. Agor is in agreement, stating that it’s ‘the feel and atmosphere’ which is ‘ important to create context for the performance’. In her work, especially in Nocturnal Sun, the audio and visual combine to offer a sense of otherworldiness, they’re ‘world building when there isn’t a clear structure or narrative to lead the audience through’.

In Penumbra however there is a clearer connection between what is being seen and heard by the audience, with the music having originally influenced the visual aspect, but with that in turn now offering cues for De Saint Paul and Sterling to respond to with musical improvisation. ‘It’s a special project whereby music influences visual, visual influences music, friends inspire friends,’ explains Sterling, ‘It’s hard to pin down exactly where this continuum starts and ends, but what is for certain is that all elements feel very in sync with one another, because they inform one another’. 

How much does the performance venue influence an audio-visual approach?

In short, quite significantly. Much as hosting a concert performance outside of a concert hall can change its atmosphere, the venue in which an audio-visual piece is presented will change its dynamic, but potentially also its form. It can prevent challenges that range, as Sterling puts it, ‘from practical through to conceptual,’ and when it comes to performances of Penumbra, ‘often a venue’s size will dictate how the lighting will work and where the screen will be situated and how we perform in that space and how it will resonate.’

Agor too has had to make adaptations to her work to allow for variances of venues. ‘In its fully realised form Nocturnal Sun would be performed with an ensemble of dancers and larger ensemble of musicians,’ she explains, but ‘it has also been performed in Brixton House Theatre with three dancers and a pre-recorded musical accompaniment, which shifted the emphasis onto using the lighting, dancing and movement to tell the story.’ It meant that Agor had to ‘release the feeling that something is missing, that performing the music with a smaller ensemble is not enough,’ and instead embrace how ‘any opportunity to share the work is exciting and gives a new challenge in imagining new ways of staging; abstracting some elements and presenting others’.

Are there any other challenges an audio-visual work needs to overcome?

Well, yes, many, and chief among them is ensuring that one element of the performance doesn’t overpower the other. As Agor points out, it can be a tricky balance to find the right visual, ‘something that can accompany a performance without being too distracting from the music as well as being visually compelling’. And at the same time, not forgetting that ‘the aim is to communicate the style and theme of the overall piece as well as its concept.’

It also pays not to become too predictable. In Chasing Sunlight, the visuals have live elements that respond to the orchestra’s performance, being cued by visual editors in response to musical gestures. For Boden then the challenge becomes one of ensuring that these live elements which respond directly to musical cues ‘are not overused so the effect is not diluted’.

For a work like Penumbra, which brings together three elements – music, lighting and film – one of the greatest challenges for Sterling comes from needing to ‘be aware of all elements at the same time; responding to a lighting cue, a clip of dialogue on-screen and reacting to what De Saint Paul is playing. I really like it’.

And when a work involves significant elements of improvisation as Penumbra does, then another challenge is presented by the fact that the work is constantly evolving, as De Saint Paul reiterates. ‘Penumbra isn’t finished per se… the installation is a moving process, it can be interpreted through different emotions each time, so we can always engage with it…  this aspect of feeling the freshness of our work makes Penumbra extremely valuable for us’.