Ear Sees, Eye Hears

The interconnections among music and the visual arts have been a source of inspiration in Western culture for hundreds of years. The medium difference caused artists and theoreticians to investigate analogies, connections and mutual influences among them in diverse artistic and historical contexts. Modernism and technology saw the birth of new ways in combining music, sound and image and open new horizons in the age of multimedia and internet.

The interconnections among music and picture are the subject of an extensive research at the last two decades in Israel and abroad. The discourse calls for a wide variety of disciplines, among them the history of art, musicology, philosophy, technology, and cognition, and creates fruitful and updated collaborations.

The anthology Ear Sees, Eye Hears: On the Interconnections among Sound and Picture in Art – the first book in Hebrew dedicated to that field – is an example of such a discourse. It contains nine articles, written by expert scholars from Israel and abroad, and four shorter essays written by artists who describe their own creative process. Thus, the book gives a panoramic view of the cutting-age research and combines theory and practice. The book concentrates on Modernism, avant-garde and contemporary art, on the background of wider historical and theoretical contexts, and offers answers as well as questions regarding painting, music, performance art, voice art, cinema, animation, visual music, and multimedia. It is written for scholars, students, teachers, artists of different media and art lovers, and opens a door for additional learning.