Several trends indicate growing public curiosity for visual music. During the summer of 2005, the nation’s first large-scale visual music retrospective was presented by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., drawing over 20,000 people on opening night alone. Industry pioneer Apple has recently added video capability to its wildly popular i-pod music player and has always included visualization within its i-tunes jukebox software. Pop concerts have included visuals for decades, and classical presenters are now experimenting with multimedia as well.

Although advances in computer technology are fueling an unprecedented surge in public interest, conceptually, visual music is nothing new. Composers have always described music with visual verbiage. "Tonal colors", "orchestral shapes", and "contrapuntal lines" are but a few of the phrases used by those struggling to articulate the nuances of their abstract aural art in familiar visual terms. In fact, developing the ability to visualize music, to quite literally see its shapes, textures, and colors in the mind’s eye, has been a goal of traditional training in composition for some 400 years.

Around the turn of the century, Kandinsky, widely regarded as the father of abstract art, brought visual music out of his imagination and onto canvass. Upon hearing Wagner's Lohengrin for the first time, Kandinsky described the "shattering" synaesthetic experience: "I saw all my colours in my mind's eye. Wild lines verging on the insane formed drawings before my very eyes." Elsewhere in his prolific writing, Kandinsky explains that he associated individual colors with the keys of the piano and believed that musical harmony found its analogue in the harmony of colors produced by blending pigments on the palette. His bold use of abstract color and form evolved as a means to translate music's abstract components into the visual realm.

At the same time the pioneers of modern music were using visual concepts to guide their development. Debussy, for instance, had originally wanted to be a painter. The famous French pianist Alfred Cortot, a contemporary of Debussy, explained that "Debussy possessed the ability to reproduce in sound the 'optical impression' that he had either formed directly or through his contact with pictorial art and literature." In perhaps his greatest example of pictorial music, La Mer, Debussy conveys his visual impression of the sea through a sonic image, even going so far as to translate ripples on the water’s surface into shimmering violins.

But composers like Scriabin wanted to go even further, actually integrating projections of colors and images into live performances of new works. At this stage, a new breed of visual artist began taking the first steps toward artistic synthesis. Turn-of-the century projection technology such as the magic lantern was very popular and was often used to project religious imagery coordinated to music during church services. Four decades later, Disney and the Philadelphia Orchestra proved that a seamless blend of classical music and then cutting-edge animation could bring the symphony to the forefront of popular culture with Fantasia.

Over 100 years after the visual music movement began, Arts in Motion artists have pioneered patent-pending technologies that fully realize the potential of synaesthesia for the first time. Arts in Motion's musicians, computer programmers, animators, and video artists are able to translate music into a dynamic and fully immersive visual experience, defining the current state of the art for music visualization while fueling classical music’s evolution into the 21st century.