Since the advent of film, time-based visual media has been accompanied by music. In the silent era, recordings or live performances (via piano, organ, orchestra) were played alongside the movie, but were in no way the primary focus of the audience. When technology enabled sound to be recorded onto the filmstrip, the live collaboration of audio and image ceased. The combination of media became a single work—sights and sounds fixed in time on the same strip of celluloid. Being fixed, the effects of one on the other were more difficult for a viewer to decipher—the synthesis appearing natural/inevitable due to its pre-existent form, rather than the perceived construction-in-progress that followed from a live accompaniment.

The San Francisco Bay Area is considered at the forefront of technological innovations in art as well as the intersection of genres and media. During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the SF Bay Area was home to many artists experimenting with time-based visual media, such as Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger, as well as musicians experimenting with sound (Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick).

The popular counterculture of the late 60s brought multi-media spectacles to hippie havens like the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom produced by impresario, Bill Graham, and the earnest Chet Helms' Family Dog, for which the aforementioned Conner occasionally provided accompanying visuals. The psychedelic oil and water visuals of these rock and roll shows altered the relationship between audio and imagery, in that the music took center stage, and the visuals served an accompanying role (the opposite of the silent film soundtrack in the early part of the century.)

Coming out of the psychedelic era, but not actually produced until 1979, Pink Floyd's film The Wall, despite its sexualized flora and other heavy-handed symbolism, was probably one of the earlier examples on the pop front in which the media component departed from a purely documentary or eye-candy-esque function. Earlier music films, such as the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night and Help!, constructed narratives around the music, but structurally resembled the Hollywood musical films of the first part of the century, in which the music served as punctuation to a filmic narrative or as an underlying structure to a narrative, the sole purpose of which seemed to be capitalization on the rise of cinema over theater in terms of profit potential. The Pink Floyd film, one could argue, can be seen in that light. While the cinematic element maintains its own integrity, the film breaks with the tradition of diegetically featuring the musicians.

In 1981, Bruce Conner created a music video for the David Byrne/Brian Eno song, America Is Waiting, featuring footage from industrial and propaganda films: black and white imagery of whitebread folks saluting the flag, satellite dishes, and military communications specialists circa WWII at work. That year also marked the advent of MTV, which engendered new possibilities for relationships between music and media. The preponderance of music videos is that they are performance documents, or at least document the songs' performers. In Britain in the 1980s, a group of media artists practicing what was called, Scratch Video, bridged the art/pop gap. Following Conner's example, Scratch Video appropriated and cut up footage montage-style. Scratch Video was found most often in clubs, accompanying dance music. The video works, employing imagery recorded from broadcast television news (as well as other sources), which were often critiques of the conservative Thatcher government then in power, were not constructed to accompany the music, but they shared similarities in rhythm and use of sampling.

The 1990s saw the rise of the VJ (the video DJ) in clubs, as well as the development of technology which was targeted at that market—much like audio technology was a decade earlier. A lot of VJ projections were (and still are) eye candy—additional stimuli—often mixed and edited in rhythm with the music. Imagery commonly associated with club VJs includes evolving fractal patterns and quickly-shifting organic shapes in contrasting bright colors.

There is a distinguished local history of groups rescoring and re-contextualizing pre-existing films with live musical performance, hearkening back to the earlier relationship between moving images and sound. One of the earliest groups engaged in this was the Club Foot Orchestra (led by Richard Marriott) which, starting in the mid-1980s, who composed and performed new scores to mostly-silent films, including German Expressionist classics, Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. One member of Club Foot, Nik Phelps, went on to form the Sprocket Ensemble, which performs Phelps' scores to animated shorts, often in collaboration with the film makers. A recent addition to the pantheon of local re-composers, the Pornorchestra, a project of the mythic Shannon Mariemont, features experimental musicians composing or improvising new scores to adult films, from the Mitchell Brothers oeuvre to anime. Often the discordant, atonal, or difficult nature of the music works to recontextualize the film, serving as a Brechtian alienation device. Occasionally, the projectionist becomes part of the improvisation pausing, fast forwarding, or shuttling in slow-motion through the film in accordance with the conductor of the musical ensemble.

Other Bay Area artists are currently taking more experimental approaches to ordering image and sound. Local ensemble, Wetgate (Peter Conheim, Steve Dye, Owen O'Toole, and recently, Maximillian Godino) has been turning the master-slave dichotomy of film sound upside down since 1995. In their own words, "By rearranging the 'officially' coupled audio and image, we re-position them in an effort to examine both image and sound separately and together. By bringing the projectionist(s) out of the booth and onto the stage, their role as performers is redefined."

Wetgate performs "pieces for multiple 16mm sound projectors as a 'band', the machines and films as musical instruments. We collage projected images and optical audio tracks from film loops and fragments, using electronic effects to sample and delay our films' sounds, slowly ripping the stitching out from between the soundtrack and image coupled in the film material. Sometimes a projection is used simply to call attention to a primarily auditory event." [1]

Another local group, the Overdub Club (musicians, Lucio Menegon and Mark DeGliantoni, and filmmakers, Alfonso Alvarez and Thad Povey) also incorporates soundtracks from ephemeral film into live performance, though the members' roles are generally that of musician or image-producer, in contrast to the members of Wetgate who play both roles. The Overdub Club's imagists often control multiple projectors, and the group's performances are long-form improvisations with sound and image playing off one another in real time.

Media artist Matthew Biederman's Delray project is a technologically elaborate collaboration with Chicago-based musician, Bart Woodstrup. Each artist employs a digital workstation, processing environmental data input through temperature, light, motion sensors and video cameras, which algorithmically determines the dynamics of the sound or video. Woodstrup utilizes local software maker Cycling 74's Max MSP to apply granular, wavetable and FM synthesis (to name a few processes) to the environmentally-impacted audio. Biederman uses a variety of programs like QuickDraw to make auto-compositions and Open GL, as well as QuickTime to create video collages. The two artists' workstations are networked, allowing for a dialogue between audio and image, occasionally creating feedback loops.

Video artist and photographer Sue Costabile and musician/programmer Kit Clayton collaborate along similar lines to Biederman and Woodstrup, though Costabile's approach is more hands-on—personally manipulating found objects or manipulating fed-in video cameras and microphones through similar computer-aided synthesis. Costabile's imagery has a delicate, organic quality, much like the many-tendriled potato that is the logo of her and Clayton's Orthlong Musork record label.

While there is a long and impressive history of artists producing innovative work in the arena of intermedia performance, technological advances have made it more approachable to those who aren't programmers, tinkerers, and circuit-benders, or who have access to (or can afford to) enlist the services of those with specialized technical skills. Lightweight, relatively inexpensive LCD projectors, video mixers, and laptops have given live video performance much potential for complexity and sophistication, even in a live, improvisatory context. In recent years, there has been a growing number of festivals, performance series, and other high-profile events devoted to media-music performance, which should eventually serve to cement it as its own genre rather than an artistic other.