Author Information
Belinda X. Chen, Bilkent University, TürkiyeFulten Larlar, Bilkent University, Türkiye
Abstract
Artistic innovation often begins with dialogue, whether between sound and image, movement and word, past and present. French composer Charles Koechlin envisioned many of his piano miniatures as inherently cinematic, composing them in the early 20th century to accompany imagined films. Although this vision was never realized during his lifetime, it reflects a rich tradition of intermedial exchange in which music engages directly with visual narrative. This project reimagines Koechlin’s vision through a contemporary lens, situating his work within a broader lineage of cross-disciplinary artistic correspondence, continuing the dialogue of Alexander Scriabin’s synesthetic compositions and the visual music of Hans Richter, Walther Ruttman, and Oskar Fischinger. Portrait of Daisy Hamilton for Piano and Animation is an academic project that revisits and reimagines these inter-artistic dialogues. Developed at Bilkent University, the collaboration brought together faculty and students from the Music and Performing Arts Faculty and the Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture. The project paired live piano performance with original animations created specifically for the music, effectively realizing Koechlin’s cinematic vision from the 1930s through contemporary digital tools. Through mutual artistic interpretation, the project foregrounded questions of authorship, visual language, and musical narrative. It also served as a pedagogical experiment in collaborative creation, asking students to work outside their disciplinary silos to co-produce a multimedia work. In revisiting Koechlin’s unfulfilled cinematic vision through a contemporary multimedia project, this work contributes to ongoing conversations about how music can function as a form of visual narrative and artistic correspondence within film-inspired contexts.
Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2025Stream: Visual Communication
This paper is part of the MediAsia2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Chen B., & Larlar F. (2026) Visualizing Sound: Interdisciplinary Collaboration as Artistic Correspondence at Bilkent University ISSN: 2186-5906 – The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 57-63) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2025.5
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2025.5
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