Norman Mclaren was a pioneering animator, director and producer in the 20th Century, utilising various forms of animation, visual music, pixilation and graphical sound.
His particular work with drawn-on-film animation I found to be very intriguing as he was able to give shapes a sonic identity. Unlike machines such as Oscilloscopes, that process and visually display the waveforms of a certain frequency, his method worked the other way round, whereby he used images to create sound. He realised that if a sound can make a pattern on film, patterns on film would make a sound. Hand-drawing various shapes directly onto film, he played them back on a Moviola, a device that allows a film editor to view a film while editing, to determine what each shape would sound like. He discovered that the size of these patterns and shapes controlled the loudness. The tone quality was controlled by the shape of the marks. And the distance between the shapes controlled pitch. He used these hand-drawn sounds to accompany his hand drawn motion pictures, giving them their own specially designed, tailored soundtracks. It is this method that allowed him to make works such as the visual animation ‘Dots.’