When I watched the images of Whitney and Belson’s work, the most direct similarity I would come up in mind is that they all place their settings onto a black background. Like one reading we’ve read before, the artist mentioned black when it linked to sounds, it’s a color of silence, it’s a color that can absorb all the sounds. And the biggest differences I think is Whitney’s visuals are separate dots together forms a bigger shape and all the dots linked to each other. But in Belson’s work, the images are quite distorted, it’s a whole, not consist of many dots.
After I read through the text, I came to realize some similarities and differences in deeper level: “[Whitney’s] films do not refer to the actual world bet instead use optical effects to pluck at the musical inner mind and allow each viewer to become a synesthete” (Thames& Husdon 145). His visuals are pretty abstract, you almost can’t find reference in nature. But I could see Belson’s work kind of get inspirations from nature especially the powerful image of solar eclipse.
In recent pop music concerts, the visual parts are also of great importance acting as a complement of the audio. It’s very much like how Thames& Husdon described the Vortex Concert series and the later light shows: “[it] offered up dreamy arrays of colors that both extended the hallucinogenic state of the spectators and evoked synesthetic responses” (Thames& Husdon 167). For the pop music concerts, those light effects are sometimes creating some concrete figure images but more often, they are forming abstract shapes of lines with different colors in order to create a certain atmosphere of the song. Without those lights in concerts, the stage will become empty and dull.