Beethoven’s “Appassionata” in the Tube

Considering the omnipresence of visual media as well as the growing familiarity with intermedial art forms, it may not come as a surprise that new forms of audio-visual listening have become popular in the last two decades, and in ways which affect the reception of classical instrumental music. This paper focuses on a specific form of an audio-visual phenomenon — with numerous examples on YouTube — in which an audio recording of a musical piece is combined with an animated graphic visualization of the music. Here, the sound has been digitally transformed into visual-spatial relations of points and lines which can be described as a “moving diagram”.
This paper offers theoretical reflections on the visual and temporal disposition of graphically animated music videos, using the example of a realization of the third movement of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata (in which the notational space is curved into a virtual tube). The author closely examines the correlations as well as dissonances between what we hear and what we see, drawing particular attention to the different and sometimes conflicting temporalities that are at play here. Finally, the paper contemplates how the visual representation and its setting influence our listening experience and understanding of the music.