The Auroratone

[JamesWhitehead]

What connects chemical crystals, polarized light, Technicolor cinematography, mental illness and Bing Crosby?

Well the answer is the thread title and the incredibly strange little film can be seen on YouTube, together with an explanation:

Here

What it did for the patients I don't know. I found it slightly disconcerting. :shock:

 

[Bigphoot2]

Interesting and strange. If they replaced Bing with some Hendrix or Pink Floyd it might work better

 

[MrRING]

Pretty wild stuff! I wonder how many were made...

 

[GNC]

I'd like to think someone found Bing Crosby's mighty organ a comfort. Sort of psychedelia not quite realised, isn't it?

 

[OneWingedBird]

A comfort? That organ sounds a bit Dr Phibes to me.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

Yes, that organ has the chapel-of-rest ambiance that afflicted some varieties of popular music in the thirties. It does suggest the patients were meant to be sedated by this audio-visual creep-show.

When it comes to psychedelia, I keep rediscovering the iTunes visualizer(s) and set them to work on a variety of material. I am always (sometimes literally) entranced by these odd visions of exploding and developing fractal worlds. I would not say the effect is entirely therapeutic: there is something essentially chilling about watching these processes.

I was pleased to find the free VLC media player has its own visualizer which is just as mind-bending, if not more so! Mind you, it was interpreting a Harry Partch score, which must have offered some interesting pitch-calculations. What next, I wonder, maybe a bit of Nancarrow will hit some interesting spots . . . :blissed: