Three Dimensions
The early history of this art was
driven by an interest in color. In the
eighteenth century, a Jesuit priest, Louis-
Bertrand Castel, invented the first color
organ. Others, including D.D. Jameson,
Bainbridge Bishop, and A. Wallace
Rimington, created color organs through
the next century [2]. These instruments,
typically controlled by playing a pianostyle
keyboard, bathed a screen in everchanging
colored light. By the twentieth
century, painters were experimenting with
relationships of color and form, creating a
new, abstract art. Many of them were also
interested in the relationship of painting
to music. The Cubist painter Leopold
Survage wrote in 1914 that "painting,
having liberated itself from the
conventional forms of objects in the
exterior world, has conquered the terrain of
abstract forms. It must get rid of its last
and principal shackle-immobility-so as to
become as supple and rich a means of
expressing our emotions as music is" [3].
By 1930, Thomas Wilfred had coined
the word lumia to describe the emerging
art, and organized the structure of lumia
around three factors. "Form, color and
motion are the three basic factors in
lumia-as in all visual experience-and form
and motion are the two most important"
[4]. It was with Wilfred's Clavilux that
controls came to be organized into three
groups.
For each of these three domainscolor,
form, and motionit is necessary to
decide what parameters will be
manipulated and how composers and
players will control them. In effect, one
needs to determine what "knobs" will be
available.