3 Graphic Notations and Musical Graphics by Sound Artists

With the emergence of cross-genre sound art, visual artists began to use musical graphics. Their interest in the individual handwriting manifesting itself in musical graphics is greater than that of composers, who were concerned with the establishment of a new, normative graphic canon. Nelson Goodman distinguishes the autographical, artistic signature from allographic notation, which can be standardized and thus reproduced and of which there is no original.^[16]

In the mid-1970s, several visual artists turned to the border area of music. In 1976, the artist Gerhard Rühm (born in 1930) began creating visual music, which does without a performer or assigns this role to the reader.^[17] Besides Lesemusik (music for reading), freely drawn graphics on sheet music that do or do not specify instruments, there are Notenüberzeichnungen (overdrawn sheet music), in which the notes of a printed piece of music are blackened out with pencil so that the musical density developments are visually heightened.

As a sound artist, Rolf Julius deals with the structure of sound, its combination with visual elements, and its position in space, as well as with the associative potential that his musical graphics, such as the Song Books, have for musicians. In Verstrijken (2007), the artist William Engelen (born in 1964) transcribes the daily routine of musicians into a graphic score to which the musicians in turn play. For listeners, the notes are simultaneously attached to the wall.^[18]