Trinity College Dublin

Department Member, Dept. of Music & Dept. of Electrical Engineering

About

Maura McDonnell is a visual music artist, visual music researcher and part-time lecturer based in Ireland and is now (since October 2011) a PhD candidate at the ATRL, Trinity College, Dublin.  The topic of her thesis is on visual music.
She studied Music and Mathematics at The National University of Ireland, Maynooth and completed her M.Phil in Music and Media technology at Trinity College, Dublin in 1998/1999. She currently lectures part-time on the M.Phil. in Music and Media Technologies programme at Trinity College, Dublin (a joint initiative from the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and the School of Drama, Film and Music, Trinity College Dublin) teaching modules on the music and image strand of the course.

After discovering the power of sound and image by completing a number of experimental audio-visual works, Maura has since and continues to embark on an inquiry into the origins and existing practice in visual music and creates visual music works in collaboration with music composers. For this purpose, she keeps a blog and website at http://visualmusic.blogspot.com and http://www.soundingvisual.com

In 2007 and 2009, Maura was commissioned by Dennis H.Miller, DMA, artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon, held in Boston in 2007 and New York in 2009, to write an introductory essay on Visual Music for the programme catalogue.  The incredible visual music marathons were held at North Eastern University, Boston in 2007 and at the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2009.

In 2009, Maura presented a paper on ‘Visual Music – integrated composition’ for the Seeing Sound Symposium held at Bath Spa University, UK at the Bath Spa University’s Center for Musical Research organized by Dr Joseph Hyde.  This paper examined the practice of integrated composition in visual music works that have been created by students of the M.Phil in Music and Media Technologies programme from 2002 to 2008.  In 2010, Maura presented a paper ‘ Visual Music – the things themselves’ for the Sounding Out 5 conference held in Bournemouth University, UK. 
In August 2010, Maura was commissioned by Dr Dermot Furlong to create a visual music work in collaboration with the Irish composer Linda Buckley, surround sound expert Gavin Kearney and Dermot Furlong.  Silk Chroma was the result and was installed as a fixed media installation with 10.2 channels of sound for the Dublin Innovation Week 2010 in Trinity College, Dublin.
View Silk Chroma
http://vimeo.com/silkchroma

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