Dr. Maura Mc Donnell

Dr Maura McDonnell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, delivering two modules on Visual Music for the M. Phil in Music and Media Technologies course and supervising Master's student thesis projects on topics that relate to visual music and audiovisual practice and research. Maura's primary degree is in Music and Mathematics that she completed in NUIM (Maynooth University) in 1985. She has two masters degrees, an M.Ed in Adult Education in Professional Development from Ulster University and an M.Phil in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College, Dublin. Her skill level in music and media technology subjects consists of digital sound synthesis programming, digital signal processing, adventurous music composition, algorithmic music composition, multimedia systems, psychoacoustics, and audio and video production. For twenty years, Maura engaged in independent arts practice research into the topic of visual music, approaching her research from the perspective of a practicing visual music artist. She was influenced by the field of Musique concrète in initiating her research and practice into visual music, and initially applied such methods, aesthetics and approaches from Musique concrète to dynamic moving image art processes. This research culminated in the completion of her PhD in 2019, titled: 'Finding Visual Music in its Twentieth Century History'. Maura is an active contributor to an international network of arts practice researchers in the field of audiovisual culture, synaesthesia and visual music in particular. She is involved at committee level in several symposiums and has been regularly invited as reviewer for selection committees both for research publication projects and for film screening programmes. Her academic writings have been published in chapters in books and have been presented at national and international conferences and symposia and in journals, exhibition and festival catalogues. Recent academic outputs include a chapter titled: 'Inventing Instruments: Colour-Tone Correspondence to Colour-Music Performance (pre-1900)' for the Routledge publication, 'Live Visuals' (July 2022) and a chapter titled: 'Visual Music Expression - Digital Technology Methods' along with a visual music video work published in 'MuVi6 International exhibition of videos on synesthesia and visual music' (November 2022). Maura's visual music arts practice consists of crafting abstract moving and dynamic visuals for and with music, where both art forms are equal in terms of aesthetic result and intention. She works mainly with electroacoustic and computer music but also with acoustic music. Her work process is to work with digital manipulated video effects in digital video effects software, as well as using computer generative processes and programming to craft her visuals. She creates standalone visual music works and digital abstract films and also collaborates with artists, musicians and composers to create visuals for a variety of settings. Her visual music works have been screened, presented at music concerts and in art installations all over the world, such as Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Spain, UK, US. Her visual music works have won several awards. A collaborative work with the composer Linda Buckley was awarded a Visual Music Award in Frankfurt. Her work with musician and producer Bebhinn McDonnell had an honorary mention in the annual MuVI contest in Spain/Italy. Recent collaborations have also been with composer and sonic artist Dr Cobi van Tonder, concert pianist Dr Svetlana Rudenko and the US based Ensemble Parallax.

  Aesthetics   Art Criticism   Art Works/Artifacts   Choreography   Cinema/Video   Composition and Algorithmic composition, spectral music   Computer Arts   Computer Music   Continental philosophy   Creative Arts   Cultural Activities   Culture   Dance   Design Arts   Drawing   Electro-optics   Expansion Arts   Film Theory   Fine Arts   Graphic Design   Harmonic Analysis, Wavelets   History & Appreciation of Art   History & Appreciation of Music   Installation Art   Inter-Arts--Interdisciplinary Art Forms   Media Arts   Mixed-Media Art   Modern Art   Modernism, postmodernism   Multimedia   Music   Music Composition   Music Criticism   Musicology/Music Theory   New Music   Opera/Musical Theatre   Painting   Performance and technology   Performance Theory   Performing Arts   Philosophical Literature   Poetry   Stochastic Processes   Video art   Video Installation   Videoart   Virtual Reality   Visual art   Visual Arts   Visual Culture   Visual Music   Visual perception