The Singing Gallery: Combining Music and Static Visual Artworks

Abstract

This paper presents, The Singing Gallery, an artistic exploration developed to discover the extent to which music can affect one's viewing experience of static visual artworks in a gallery setting. This project was conceived to explore integration between vision and sound in an art gallery environment. Specifically, we aimed to assess the extent to which musical cues can enhance or modify the viewer's experience of abstract art. The Singing Gallery takes shape in the form of a virtual reality (VR) art gallery, featuring a selection of visual artworks. Each artwork is associated with a unique piece of acousmatic music, which has been specifically composed for by the first author, which increases in volume as the audience member moves towards the painting. In the paper, we discuss the epistemological grounding and detail the development of the interactive VR system. We then offer concluding remarks based on auto-ethnographic reflections.