Visual Music
Betancourt has discovered that the inventor Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced the earliest hand-painted films known to still exist. However, these were not movies but films produced specifically to be performed by her earliest version of the Sarabet which was a machine for automatic accompaniment to records. This device was an early music visualizer of the type now included with computer audio-players. Even though these films were not designed to be motion pictures, they were produced with templates and aerosol sprays, producing repeating geometric patterns in the same way as the hand painted films of Len Lye from the 1930s.
He has also published a short monograph, combined with a large collection of short essays, pictures and other archival material about the visual music group Lumonics that was organized and run by Mel and Dorothy Tanner in South Florida.
Most of his other visual music-related scholarship takes the form of anthologies of technology patents, or reprints of earlier texts on visual music machines designed for live performance.
Read more about this topic: Michael Betancourt
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