Synchromy: a conceptual model for perfect Artistic Swimming
Introduction
In 2017 FINA (the global governing body of competitive swimming) changed the sport's name from Synchronised to Artistic Swimming (AS). Although controversial, most countries have adopted this change by 2020.
I use intellectual opportunism to examine the artistic nature of the sport and the implications for its full appreciation.
I use two sets of ideas with a particular focus on synchromy to underpin the relevance of philosophy to the beauty of AS.
Background to Synchromy
Synchromy is a conceptual model of art that by fusing colours (syn - with - chromos - colour) perfectly produces an understanding of the piece. Importantly it does not use lines to direct the interpretation of the piece. If successful, the artist produces an interpretation by the observer that was intended. 🤔
I broaden this concept to AS with implications for understanding the limits to a perfect performance that current competitive swimmers face. First by giving examples of traditional Synchromy by film and painting.
Norman McLaren (a Canadian experimental film director) applied the colour theory concepts of synchromy (1971) to film. Stimulated by their teacher (Percyval-Tudor) the artists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald‐Wright developed the theory 60 years earlier and were early American abstract painters. Unable to display the full size paintings in this paper, I use the movie to start with.
Synchromy: The Movie
Norman McLaren was an award winning Canadian director (1909 -1987). The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has 39 of his animations and shorts on its website (22 April 2020). To quote them:
"This animated short [Synchromy - 1971] features synchronisation of image and sound in the truest sense of the word. To make this film, McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track, which he then moved, in multicolour, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear." NFB website (23 April 2020).
The film is 7 minutes long and gradually increases in complexity.
He took photos of cards that had shapes of different colour, proportions and hue. He created a soundtrack where each note - its pitch, tone, timbre, loudness - is associated with a specific card. As the cards change position at different speeds on the screen, the soundtrack changes.
His motivation was to produce a perfect confluence of the two senses that he could control in this medium - site and sound. Hence you see what you hear and hear what you see.
The result is a sensation that is non perceptual and is not per se capable of exploitation.. This idea of unifying physical senses perfectly to produce another sensation is at the heart of synchromy. 🤔
Synchromy: The Art
Russell and MacDonald-Wright were young avant-guard American artists who jointly exhibited an abstract form of colour-based painting in 1911 ff.
They were not interested in the optical but more in the psychological and emotional effects of the art. The link with music was formative and developed by their Canadian teacher Percyval-Tudor. The twelve colours were the notes on a scale, the luminosity was equivalent to pitch, the saturation to the sound’s intensity, and the hue was equivalent to musical tone.
The rhythmic use of colour would elicit senses & emotions that are not depicted directly by the form of the work, analogous to the refrain of a symphonic composition.
For example, New York's MoMA exhibits a 1917 MacDonald-Wright piece "synchromy"
The dynamism, vortex, and emotional reactions are indubitable although what the painting physically represents is unclear. This is typical of early synchromist work and was purely abstract with two important pieces:
Russell's "Synchromy in orange: to form"
and Benton's "Bubbles (1914-17)"
Nevertheless, the use of colour without using lines, did start to incorporate figures eg MacDonald-Wright's Synchromy in Blue where in the swirl of colour, the image of a seated man appears - his knee projects on the left side and his back and shoulders on the right.
Even more explicit is the way two nudes curve their dancing bodies into the colours around them found in Arthur B Davies's 1914 "Day of good fortune"
The intellectual/academic underpinnings motivated and justified their paintings. Nevertheless as Macdonald-Wright said, an understanding of this technical element is not intended to be necessary to interpret or appreciate the art.
Artistic Swimming: The way it is assessed at competition
Synchronised Swimming is not just the coordination of swimmers' movements together (syn) with time (chronos). It is much more enveloping than technical competence.
An observer experiences and reacts to a performance in their own unique way. Hence the need for panels of judges whose scores are manipulated to resolve differences without bias.
Judges assess different routines on different dimensions. Typically three panels assess three elements of a performance based on a combination of the execution, synchronisation, difficulty, choreography, music interpretation, and manner of presentation. Furthermore different types of routine place different weight to these dimensions eg a solo swimmer's synchronisation accounts for only 10% of the final score. Doubtless perplexing to most people, FINA defines all of these in detail.
If an Olympian achieves the maximum possible score, was the performance perfect? Was it beautiful? Was it sublime?
The Russian team's free routine "prayer" at the 2016 Olympics won gold with a score of 99.1333. Assuming a perfect score was impossible, the 1976 Olympic gymnastics scoreboard could not display Nadia Comăneci's scores of 10. Artistic Swimming scoreboards should ensure that it can accommodate a score of 10.000 from a faultless performance.
Synchromy and Artistic Swimming
The concepts of synchromy applied to Artistic Swimming (AS) offer a more profound understanding of the sport than a faultless score. If nothing else it creates a theoretical justification for the limits of assessing an AS performance for its perfection.
A synchromist manipulates their medium to provoke an unexpected emotional reaction other than a merely literal appreciation. Russell used colour to evoke a musical sensibility. McLaren’s film combined the visual with sound perfectly to invoke a different profound interpretation.
AS also has sight and hearing to manipulate but arguably the observer uses all five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) in the experience of a performance. In totality, the performance could generate a different understanding than technical. But what is the unexpected sensation that a perfect artistic swim achieves? I believe it to be a sense of beauty.
Beauty and the Sublime
Beauty vs Perfect
An AS judge/coach can teach the components that make a synchro piece faultless. These elements are technically taught, objectively assessed and we learn that high scores represent excellence. The judge/coach is essential to contributing to a verifiable non-abstract conception of perfection.
Without this formal education, can a spectator find the piece beautiful? I agree with Macdonald-Wright that the education is not a requirement for recognising beauty. There are intangible aspects that are necessary for beauty. These may be culturally different but importantly, absence of these intangibles prevents the acknowledgement of profound beauty.
To illustrate this in the way I describe a beautiful performance to someone who was not there.
"It was beautiful because of the dynamics of the music, the delicate handling of the complex throws with elegance and panache".
It summarises what my senses perceived. But my experience was more profound. There was something else that I am unable to convey that made the performance beautiful to me.
Perhaps it was background information that was important: the release of Nelson Mandela inspired the choreography and performed by white anti apartheid elderly South Africans.
But it was not the technical merits that made it beautiful for me.
This imaginary example shows that combination of all sensual and non-sensual elicited a beauty judgement that could only be achieved by being there.
This is an extreme position but judgements of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level, but they usually go beyond that.
Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once. The perfect artistic swim is the most sophisticated application of synchromy because it requires a balance of all of them.
The Sublime
Can a performance be sublime but not beautiful?
I experience a piece being sublime if I sense its enormity and power. The background knowledge of the example above made it sublime. But I recognise that a piece can be beautiful but not sublime. Perhaps sublime is one part of beauty.
The Sublime needs risk. Beauty does not.
Is there a risk element that contributes to the feeling of sublime? Unlike beauty, I think there is. In the same way that rock climbing or free diving have a danger that holds us in our seats, a sublime synchro piece also has that. Look at the faces of spectators as they gasp in fearful awestruck admiration at some performances.
Teaching beautiful and sublime artistic swimming
An important sociological empirical study of teaching synchronised swimming by Dafne Muntanyola-Saura (2011 Distributed Marking in Sport Corrections: A Conversation Analysis of Synchronized Swimming) is a conversation on the elements of Olympians' performance that can and cannot be taught by the coaches.
To summarise, coaches and swimmers are masters of different skills. Coaches can communicate their knowledge and expertise. But swimmers communicate their expertise amongst themselves, often in subtle ways. Both of these are vital to make a team perform at the highest level.
Are the cumulative contributions of coaches and athletes sufficient for spectators to feel the beauty of a performance? A technically perfect performance can be taught. But a spectator's sense of beauty can be independent of the technical skills.
But it in striving to achieve a high score, a faultless performance might feel sterile, primitive, or even dismissive of an aesthetic notion of beauty.
Conclusion
Synchromy is an artistic theory that has profound implications for understanding beauty in a performance and in showing the limitations that competitive AS has in achieving perfection.
The technical excellence of performance is a highly informed type of beauty. The spectator without this knowledge may have a sense of beauty that is different and perhaps more natural.
Artistic Swimming began long before any of us were born. Its beauty was recognised before its rules were set forth. Let's aspire to that beauty.
In 2017 FINA (the global governing body of competitive swimming) changed the sport's name from Synchronised to Artistic Swimming (AS). Although controversial, most countries have adopted this change by 2020.
I use intellectual opportunism to examine the artistic nature of the sport and the implications for its full appreciation.
I use two sets of ideas with a particular focus on synchromy to underpin the relevance of philosophy to the beauty of AS.
Background to Synchromy
Synchromy is a conceptual model of art that by fusing colours (syn - with - chromos - colour) perfectly produces an understanding of the piece. Importantly it does not use lines to direct the interpretation of the piece. If successful, the artist produces an interpretation by the observer that was intended. 🤔
I broaden this concept to AS with implications for understanding the limits to a perfect performance that current competitive swimmers face. First by giving examples of traditional Synchromy by film and painting.
Norman McLaren (a Canadian experimental film director) applied the colour theory concepts of synchromy (1971) to film. Stimulated by their teacher (Percyval-Tudor) the artists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald‐Wright developed the theory 60 years earlier and were early American abstract painters. Unable to display the full size paintings in this paper, I use the movie to start with.
Synchromy: The Movie
Norman McLaren was an award winning Canadian director (1909 -1987). The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has 39 of his animations and shorts on its website (22 April 2020). To quote them:
"This animated short [Synchromy - 1971] features synchronisation of image and sound in the truest sense of the word. To make this film, McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track, which he then moved, in multicolour, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear." NFB website (23 April 2020).
The film is 7 minutes long and gradually increases in complexity.
He took photos of cards that had shapes of different colour, proportions and hue. He created a soundtrack where each note - its pitch, tone, timbre, loudness - is associated with a specific card. As the cards change position at different speeds on the screen, the soundtrack changes.
His motivation was to produce a perfect confluence of the two senses that he could control in this medium - site and sound. Hence you see what you hear and hear what you see.
The result is a sensation that is non perceptual and is not per se capable of exploitation.. This idea of unifying physical senses perfectly to produce another sensation is at the heart of synchromy. 🤔
Synchromy: The Art
Russell and MacDonald-Wright were young avant-guard American artists who jointly exhibited an abstract form of colour-based painting in 1911 ff.
They were not interested in the optical but more in the psychological and emotional effects of the art. The link with music was formative and developed by their Canadian teacher Percyval-Tudor. The twelve colours were the notes on a scale, the luminosity was equivalent to pitch, the saturation to the sound’s intensity, and the hue was equivalent to musical tone.
The rhythmic use of colour would elicit senses & emotions that are not depicted directly by the form of the work, analogous to the refrain of a symphonic composition.
For example, New York's MoMA exhibits a 1917 MacDonald-Wright piece "synchromy"
The dynamism, vortex, and emotional reactions are indubitable although what the painting physically represents is unclear. This is typical of early synchromist work and was purely abstract with two important pieces:
Russell's "Synchromy in orange: to form"
and Benton's "Bubbles (1914-17)"
Nevertheless, the use of colour without using lines, did start to incorporate figures eg MacDonald-Wright's Synchromy in Blue where in the swirl of colour, the image of a seated man appears - his knee projects on the left side and his back and shoulders on the right.
Even more explicit is the way two nudes curve their dancing bodies into the colours around them found in Arthur B Davies's 1914 "Day of good fortune"
The intellectual/academic underpinnings motivated and justified their paintings. Nevertheless as Macdonald-Wright said, an understanding of this technical element is not intended to be necessary to interpret or appreciate the art.
Artistic Swimming: The way it is assessed at competition
Synchronised Swimming is not just the coordination of swimmers' movements together (syn) with time (chronos). It is much more enveloping than technical competence.
An observer experiences and reacts to a performance in their own unique way. Hence the need for panels of judges whose scores are manipulated to resolve differences without bias.
Judges assess different routines on different dimensions. Typically three panels assess three elements of a performance based on a combination of the execution, synchronisation, difficulty, choreography, music interpretation, and manner of presentation. Furthermore different types of routine place different weight to these dimensions eg a solo swimmer's synchronisation accounts for only 10% of the final score. Doubtless perplexing to most people, FINA defines all of these in detail.
If an Olympian achieves the maximum possible score, was the performance perfect? Was it beautiful? Was it sublime?
The Russian team's free routine "prayer" at the 2016 Olympics won gold with a score of 99.1333. Assuming a perfect score was impossible, the 1976 Olympic gymnastics scoreboard could not display Nadia Comăneci's scores of 10. Artistic Swimming scoreboards should ensure that it can accommodate a score of 10.000 from a faultless performance.
Synchromy and Artistic Swimming
The concepts of synchromy applied to Artistic Swimming (AS) offer a more profound understanding of the sport than a faultless score. If nothing else it creates a theoretical justification for the limits of assessing an AS performance for its perfection.
A synchromist manipulates their medium to provoke an unexpected emotional reaction other than a merely literal appreciation. Russell used colour to evoke a musical sensibility. McLaren’s film combined the visual with sound perfectly to invoke a different profound interpretation.
AS also has sight and hearing to manipulate but arguably the observer uses all five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) in the experience of a performance. In totality, the performance could generate a different understanding than technical. But what is the unexpected sensation that a perfect artistic swim achieves? I believe it to be a sense of beauty.
Beauty and the Sublime
Beauty vs Perfect
An AS judge/coach can teach the components that make a synchro piece faultless. These elements are technically taught, objectively assessed and we learn that high scores represent excellence. The judge/coach is essential to contributing to a verifiable non-abstract conception of perfection.
Without this formal education, can a spectator find the piece beautiful? I agree with Macdonald-Wright that the education is not a requirement for recognising beauty. There are intangible aspects that are necessary for beauty. These may be culturally different but importantly, absence of these intangibles prevents the acknowledgement of profound beauty.
To illustrate this in the way I describe a beautiful performance to someone who was not there.
"It was beautiful because of the dynamics of the music, the delicate handling of the complex throws with elegance and panache".
It summarises what my senses perceived. But my experience was more profound. There was something else that I am unable to convey that made the performance beautiful to me.
Perhaps it was background information that was important: the release of Nelson Mandela inspired the choreography and performed by white anti apartheid elderly South Africans.
But it was not the technical merits that made it beautiful for me.
This imaginary example shows that combination of all sensual and non-sensual elicited a beauty judgement that could only be achieved by being there.
This is an extreme position but judgements of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level, but they usually go beyond that.
Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once. The perfect artistic swim is the most sophisticated application of synchromy because it requires a balance of all of them.
The Sublime
Can a performance be sublime but not beautiful?
I experience a piece being sublime if I sense its enormity and power. The background knowledge of the example above made it sublime. But I recognise that a piece can be beautiful but not sublime. Perhaps sublime is one part of beauty.
The Sublime needs risk. Beauty does not.
Is there a risk element that contributes to the feeling of sublime? Unlike beauty, I think there is. In the same way that rock climbing or free diving have a danger that holds us in our seats, a sublime synchro piece also has that. Look at the faces of spectators as they gasp in fearful awestruck admiration at some performances.
Teaching beautiful and sublime artistic swimming
An important sociological empirical study of teaching synchronised swimming by Dafne Muntanyola-Saura (2011 Distributed Marking in Sport Corrections: A Conversation Analysis of Synchronized Swimming) is a conversation on the elements of Olympians' performance that can and cannot be taught by the coaches.
To summarise, coaches and swimmers are masters of different skills. Coaches can communicate their knowledge and expertise. But swimmers communicate their expertise amongst themselves, often in subtle ways. Both of these are vital to make a team perform at the highest level.
Are the cumulative contributions of coaches and athletes sufficient for spectators to feel the beauty of a performance? A technically perfect performance can be taught. But a spectator's sense of beauty can be independent of the technical skills.
But it in striving to achieve a high score, a faultless performance might feel sterile, primitive, or even dismissive of an aesthetic notion of beauty.
Conclusion
Synchromy is an artistic theory that has profound implications for understanding beauty in a performance and in showing the limitations that competitive AS has in achieving perfection.
The technical excellence of performance is a highly informed type of beauty. The spectator without this knowledge may have a sense of beauty that is different and perhaps more natural.
Artistic Swimming began long before any of us were born. Its beauty was recognised before its rules were set forth. Let's aspire to that beauty.