Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: computer music/multimedia

  • Math Music

    2026 . . . imaginary sound animations . . . 24:30

    How do prime numbers sound? Or Pi, or the Fibonacci series? It depends completely on how these patterns are interpreted as sound. MATH MUSIC brings them to time life with many eclectic compositional styles of contemporary art music. Interesting number patterns are realized as intriguing sound colors, chords, melodic lines, even as the ancient musical technique of canons.

    Prime Cycles . . . Fibonacci Music . . . Mystical Pi

    Permutation . . . Slopes and Asymptotes . . . Golden Ratio

    Seeking Infinity . . . Euclid’s Elements

    –

    MATH MUSIC podcast on YouTube

    explains the musical interpretation of the topic and plays each piece over a kinetic visual background of semi-abstract art images.

  • LIGHTFORMS 7: Reflected Light

    2026 . . . synthesized sound sculpture . . . 5 minutes

    Sunlight reflected off water makes an endless kaleidoscope of shining sparkles and rippling shadows, their rhythms ever changing with wind and waves.

  • Great Lakes Symphony

    2026 . . . orchestra . . . 25 minutes

    For the first 25 years of my life, my home was the “Great Lake State,” Michigan. It is surrounded by three of these five enormous bodies of water, some of the most recognizable map shapes on the entire globe.

    Magnificent Lake Superior, the deepest, is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and third-largest by volume. Growing up in the southeastern lower peninsula of Michigan, I learned to sail on Lake Erie. I spent more time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen in the northwest lower peninsula, where I worked for ten summers. All my photos were shot nearby, around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay.

    The music of this symphony took shape over the last five years in other musical sketches. It all began, though, in 1984 with PENINSULA, my first work published on a CD (Centaur Records). In it, you can “hear” the rocky shores around Northport, the point of the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula.

    All that musical sketching has finally coalesced into this four-movement symphony for chamber orchestra, a grand celebration in which you can hear wind and waves, ice-cold stillness, and glorious sun sparkles on restless blue water.

    Great Lakes Symphony

    (2026)

    Sample score pages:

  • Spectral Sound

    2026 . . . multimedia: digital images, synthesized music . . . 15 min.

    The images are digital photos abstracted to explore their vivid colors and natural shapes. The color spectrum arranges hues from what may be considered metaphorically cool (indigo/blue) to hot (red). The spectral order for frequency of light waves is the same reversed, slowest (red) to fastest (indigo).

    Sounds are tone clusters (adjacent steps of a common pitch scale sounding simultaneously instead of successively). The clusters contrast in timbre (sound color) and in harmonic complexity, ranging from complex dissonance (metaphorically red on the spectrum) to simpler, purer sounds (blue end of spectrum).

    Watch the videos on YouTube:

    “SPECTRAL SOUND“ podcast

    Listen to audio only:

    Clouds of sound emerge, pulsate, sparkle, and fade.

    Images become geometric. Tone clusters accumulate in large tides and smaller waves, they dance and dissipate.

    Geometric swatches of color cluster together like quilts. Combinations morph kaleidoscopically into one another.

  • METAMORPHS

    2025 . . . video art . . . 7 minutes

    Video art, quilting together geometric slices of colorful abstract images, kaleidoscopically morphing them into each other over a continuously evolving soundscape adapted and synthesized from the composition, RAINBOW RISING.

  • Cassiopeia

    2025 . . . piano and electronic music . . . 6:45

    The constellation Cassiopeia in the northern sky is named after the vain queen Cassiopeia, mother of Andromeda in Greek mythology. One of 48 constellations listed by the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, its distinctive ‘W‘ shape is formed by five bright stars. Cassiopeia contains some of the most luminous stars known, including three hypergiants. Its brightest star, Cassiopeia A (“Schedar”), is a supernova remnant and bright radio source.

    The music arose from tracing a map of its brightest points of light. The coordinates of these points on a two-dimensional graph were converted into time and pitch patterns articulating a grand sonority. The graph can be rotated, kaleidoscopically transforming the pattern into similar sonorities.

    The same treatment applied to Cassiopeia’s constellation neighbors Perseus and Cepheus builds a denser field of sounds, metaphorically echoing the brilliant star-studded dark sky as seen through a powerful telescope.

    View the music video on the YouTube podcast:

    SONUS – Meditation Music

  • The Final Angel

    2025 . . . synthesized sound montage . . . 7 minutes

    Electronic sounds from previous ANGELS pieces (The Fourth Angel, Angels of Bright Splendor) make layered counterpoint for a dark, unearthly montage. Music from another piece, String Theory, originally imagining spinning subatomic energy, provides an ironically human voice, both frantic, engulfed in the threatening sound environment, and soaring hopefully above it.

    Global warming is already devastating the earth and all life on it. The Bible’s Revelation 16 tells of seven frightening angels:

    “The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire; they were scorched by the fierce heat.”

    The other six angels and their bowls wrought plagues of painful sores, bloody seas, bloody rivers, darkness.

    “Finally, the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice of doom came out of heaven, saying, ‘IT IS DONE!’ There were noises and thunderings and lightnings; a great earthquake. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.”

    The Final Angel

    Watch a YouTube video with abstract images:

  • Montage

    2025 . . . multimedia, computer music and digital images (6:45)

    Original music and visual images are assembled in a manner inspired by quilts, layers of fabric in small swatches pieced together. The Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania were known especially for quilts of contrasting colors of repeating geometric shapes.

    In MONTAGE, layering is applied to both synthesized musical textures and to digitally enhanced images from my Nikon Z50 (NIKKOR 16-50 lens). Three musical textures — flutters, swelling chords, and an ancient-style canon — are quilted onto an unchanging broad harmonic background. They overlay each other in four different combinations.

    Video here – YouTube podcast

    Listen here (audio only) –

  • LIGHTFORMS 6: Vespers

    2025 . . . musical impressions of dusk (12:00)

    The video version of VESPERS reveals a Haiku-like text, quoting one melliflous phrase from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913).

    Streams of crimson
    streak the sky
    above tree silhouettes.
    Dusk settles
    “in the antiphony of afterglow.”
    A new night
    consumes the shadows.

    View the video on YouTube in

    LIGHTFORMS – Radiant Music podcast

  • DARK ENERGY

    2025 . . . computer music (7:00)

    Measuring supernovae, cosmologist Vera Rubin hypothesized that 80% of what’s out there in the universe is invisible or otherwise undetectable, mysterious matter and energy of undiscovered nature. Imagined in sound and color, dark-energy music is amorphous in form and time flow. Canonic lines float and interweave, building an evolving fabric of complex, ethereal sonorities.