The Interactive Intermedia tool allows a researcher to test and analyze a wide variety of algorithmically-generated musical strategies, and further to explore cross-modal effects on visual information. The patch requires an initial pitch interval selection to create an interval set, then provides control over many coincident variables such as loudness, rhythm, timbre, melody, intensity and instrumentation.

The Intermedia patch also allows one to load and alter images. The patch enables performance of tasks such as adjustment of lighting level, color correction, and idiosyncratic hue displacement, by allowing the user either discretely or in groupings to modify brightness, contrast, saturation and hue. An input matrix assists selection of controls.  Notably, the controls for aural and visual alterations may be grouped together.

Because structural features of music are able to elicit a wide range of emotions and moods, and because ambiguous visual situations have proven to be a useful methodological approach for exploring mood congruency effects, by using music as the triggering stimuli, this experimental design could examine how particular emotional states may function as subconscious mnemonic cues for the cognitive system. This influences the interpretation of visual information by affecting the processes of selective attention and comprehension.

It is expected that this patch could be applied to audiovisual research in many ways. For instance, within a potential experimental study, a participant may be asked to choose an interval set, and then visually to ‘tune’ a certain provided image with the previously chosen interval set. This strategy can be used in an experimental design to gain insights regarding possible links between the musical and visual structures. The following images show three different visual adjustments of the same image (Kandinsky, 1913), which might be associated to different sonorities.

Intermedia aural patch. General Overview.

The patch provides a programming environment for testing and developing algorithmic compositional strategies within the interval vector theory. In simpler terms, it serves as a composition tool based on interval content supply. Figure 1 shows the advanced visual interface for the aural section.

Intermedia visual patch. General Overview.

The patch (Figure 2) allows the user to load images, modify the ARGB color planes and alter the brightness, contrast, and saturation levels of the processed matrix.