AllMovie

Peter Bode's Music on Triggering Surfaces investigates the relation of the video image to its audio track. A black dot hovering in the center of the screen measures the voltage of an image, as the image moves behind it. The measurement of the image's luminance is then keyed to a synthesizer which produces a tonal scale based on the voltage. In order to produce a wider range of sounds, Bode adjusts the white level of the picture as its scrolls. Unfortunately, either the image or the synthesizer program does not provide enough variation to make the audio particularly interesting or the film's investigation more than one-dimensional.