In our daily life, we often make verbal visualizations referring to kinds of sound: dump, thin, clear or dirty are adjectives used to describe several sounds, by people of different music culture. These attempts to find some kind of coherence between the visual and the sonic spectrum are due to the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is called the state during a sensation causes the stimulation of another sense, except the one that was awaited to be, and as a result one experiences two or mores senses coming of the same cause. Trying to picture this feeling, several artists, during the past centuries, combined visual and sonic sensations, using the one as an explanation for the other. Alexander Scriabin, Michael Matiussin, Schuman, List, Brahms and many others, made the aforementioned trip from both directions.
During the past century, Iannis Xenakis, coming from Europe, and John Cage, coming from America, settled the base for a spatial approach of synaesthetic music, which found numerous offspring; from the well known composer Brian Eno to the anonymous techno producers in Detroit.
One of the most important factors for the synaesthetic approach of sound and vision, is the type of musical notation that is used. Since 4000 BC, man has used various ways to write down the sounds he produced. Those who brought the thunder in the way of writing a music tab were composers as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis etc, whom added personal notes or sketches, leading to the use of the term “graphic musical notation”.
Facing a landscape as an entirety of lines that represent some kind of graphic musical notation, is attempted a subjective translation of it into sound.