Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Category: digital art images

  • GREAT LAKES

    Five Symphonic Sketches

    2026 . . . synthetic orchestra . . . 34 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. I learned to sail on Lake Erie. But I spent the most time at Lake Michigan, the closest to Interlochen, where I lived for ten summers. All the photos below were shot nearby, around the Leelanau Peninsula and Grand Traverse Bay.

    The music of this five-movement symphony took shape over five years in five other musical sketches: Three States of Water, Shining Water, Great Lake (for percussion), Leelanau Sketches, and Dancing Water.

    Perhaps it all began, though, way back in 1984 with PENINSULA for piano and computer music, my first work published on a CD by Centaur Records. In it, you can “hear” the rocky shores around Northport, the point of the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula, shown here in the first photo.

    Great Lakes

    Five Symphonic Sketches

    (2026)

    I

    II

    III

    IV

    V

  • 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.

  • LIGHTFORMS 6: Vespers

    2025 . . . multimedia sound, image, text (12:00)

    Musical impressions of dusk, with text and images by the composer. Quoting one mellifluous phrase (boldface below) from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913), the VESPERS text is like a Haiku:

    Streams of crimson streak the sky

    above tree silhouettes.

    Dusk settles “in the antiphony of afterglow.“

    A new night consumes the shadows.

    View video here – YouTube podcast

    Listen here (audio only)

  • 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

  • Crystallography

    2024 . . . Abstract video and digital sound

    This is the first time I began a multimedia piece with the visual element as primary design concept rather than the music, with visuals joining after. The visual concept, as suggested by the title, is an exploration of patterns in nature featuring complex masses and threads of color. They resemble busy Jackson Pollack action paintings revealing isomorphic patterns. The title evokes the abstract patterning of molecular crystal growth.

    The synthesized “soundtrack” is music adapted from my 2022 work, STONEHENGE for solo classical guitar:

  • Sand waves

    See more images at TClark digital art galleries

  • Man-made images

    Gallery of digital art images of objects, architecture, machines

  • Nature images

    Gallery of digital art images of flora and fauna
    The Dallas Arboretum has a fern garden that takes me back to the woods of Michigan, especially around Interlochen.