Immersive Appeal

Immersive Appeal is a characteristic of media which inspires a state of involvement in which a listener gains a deep sense of union with a particular media. It is not the objective of most of the sorts of media that we encounter in everyday life. In purely musical or artistic creations, however, immersive appeal is often the goal. Immersive Appeal can be achieved by stimulating all the facets key to an experience, that is, the body, the mind, and the soul, all by way of the senses.
Physical: Often in academic music there is a sense of divorce from the body. The corporeal, visceral sense of music, however, is probably more than half the battle of communication through sound. Often there is a consideration of very lofty and technical details, but no consideration of the simple breath of a piece of music and it's discreet or dramatic physical sense of stillness and movement. The physical sense can also be tied in with the raw emotive aspects of the piece. If a dancer were reacting to it, how would they move? Their reaction is primitive and emotive, not intellectual.
Intellectual: What sustains interest and truly begins to strike a deep sense of affiliation and oneness with a piece of music is when the corporeal quality of the music is used to import something mental. This can be an image, a metaphor, a narrative, a sense of place, the feeling of a journey. Anything that begins to provoke at least some discreet degree of thought. Something that causes the emergence of a correlation to an audience's own life.
Spiritual: There is some spark of the immaterial which will set your piece on fire if you let it, given you are able to receive it. Like a person, a piece of music is a self contained universe which has a spiritual purpose and thus a certain character. The function of the immaterial in music is to use sound to sketch the activity of non-sound. To inspire an awareness of a thing which can not be heard, nor seen, nor spoken of acutely. This can not be thought over, it must simply be done.

Current Projects and a few Thoughts

Right now I'm working on an album and accompanying visualization that is a projected 60 minutes in length. The music is coming along very well and will be completed and I will be happy with it within a good time frame. YAY. I'm just doing this in the simple way that makes sense to me and makes me happy with the result. It's a kind of boundary-less approach that could be just about anything that it wants. In this case there are a number of sections built on grid-like time with looped material often interrupted unpredictably, like an erratic heartbeart, and there are a number of sections with more ambient construction, like breath. I just got my Canon Powershot SX 20 IS and I'm ready to start shooting HD Videos and then scrambling them for the visual side. I want to try to achieve something along the lines of Here Come the Waves by the Decemberists, Kouyaniqatsi, and the work of Takagi Masakatsu. In other words, Video Art. I'll need the visual component to be equally strong to the audible component which will prove to be a challenge, but I'm going to try to simply workshop it out until I'm happy with it. I'm going to start by simply imagining images while listening to the music, then drawing from those themes and ideas to try to capture real world footage and then alter and arrange it digitally to fit the aesthetic of manipulation of sound and image, regardless of the source, to be listened to and seen and appreciated for its simple, abstracted appeal.