The pages of this presentation of "If Silence is Black" were written by Allison, creator, inventer, designer, builder, and performer of and on The Crystalume.

The information is the result of Allison's experience with LUMIA, dating back to 1966. This time has been spent on the creation and development of The Crystalume system, performing, expanding the understanding of Synaesthestic VUSIC production, and in the refinement of the virtuosity of technique.

Allison speaks from a position of having done what he is talking about. Those who have an interest in this kind of thing and who have seen what Allison does when performing on The Crystalume, commonly react by saying, "Yes, that's the way it should be!".

Allison has a saying that goes: "Truth is that which confirms one's suspicions." and those who have seen Allison perform on The Crystalume agree, that is what the MUSIC would LOOK like if one could SEE what it sounded like.

The feeling that one gets from this kind of Synaesthetic stimuli is remarkable. It is a powerful potion for the person who enjoys the journeys that have largely been left for the MUSICIANS to implement. Now, with the addition of The Crystalume to the mix, the journey takes on an added dimension, that of being "transported" by beauty of transcendent magnitudes. The kind of imagery made by a Master Crystalumist equals the imagery of any other method yet devised for the production of beauty using pure LIGHT as the artistic substance.

There have at various times in man's history, when there were efforts made to produce instruments that made visible MUSIC. The Lanterna Magica, the Clavilux Lumiere', and other more or less famous examples are known to those who are interested in this kind of thing.

Allison has also invented and designed a number of other VUSIC instruments in addition to The Crystalume and is in the process of designing for general construction, a modular LIGHT Production/Projection unit for use in other VUSIC Instruments.

How all this came about is the story of Allison's quest for beauty and some of the things that happened along the way to where he now has enough experience to be authoritative enough to postulate on the subject without looking like it is all theoretical instead of actually being practical.

It is one thing to say how it should be, it is quite another to make it that way.

Yet without the concept, attempted implementation is useless.

Give a Guitar to a non-Guitarist and the SOUND you get is the result of lack of concept.

Give a Guitar to a guitarist and you can hear the melding of concept and implementation, which results in MUSIC. One does not have to be a Guitarist to be able to tell whether it is the Guitarist or the non-Guitarist that is making the SOUND with the Guitar. It becomes readily apparent when one knows how to play and it becomes equally apparent when one does not know how even if one tries to fake it.

The same holds true for a VUSICIAN as opposed to a non-VUSICIAN playing The Crystalume. It is immediately apparent to anyone that what they are seeing is the result of seeing the MUSIC or just seeing image. Only when it is done masterfully is the VUSIC visible. If it is not done masterfully, it becomes but the visual equivalent of having someone demonstrating the striking of keys on a Piano. It may be piano notes and they may have all been accessed during the demonstration, but doing that is not the same as playing a Piano concerto.

The concept is discussed at some length in the chapter called Concept.

How the concept came into existence is here revealed.

One day in 1957, Allison was a senior at Chaffey Union High School in Ontario, California. He walked through a door in the main school auditorium, which had been left ajar, not opened, but not latched. Inside, in a completely, couldn't-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face, pitch Black auditorium, there suddenly appeared on the ceiling, a spectrum that stretched from directly above the ledge of the balcony to directly over the orchestra pit. It was visible on a 50'-0" high ceiling that was coated with a sparkly acoustic insulation and which was a normal (not bright) White in color.

The colors had an overwhelming intensity and purity that made one stop in one's tracks and it so moved Allison that he stood there for what seemed like an eternity when it was only a few seconds when it happened. It was an eternity in which was revealed all that the spectrum had to tell and what the truth was concerning anything visual/aural and how they correspond.

What had actually caused the spectrum was a physics teacher had found that at a certain time of day for a few days out of each year, the Sun would shine through a small hole in a seam where the wall met the ceiling of the auditorium. The result was that it made a very intense spot of Sunlight in an otherwise completely Black room. Having found this beam of LIGHT, he had gone to his class room and had brought back a prism and had placed it in the LIGHT and it produced the spectrum that so moved Allison.

Allison is a Synaesthete. Due to an anomaly in Allison's synapses, LIGHT and SOUND produce intense Synaesthetic reactions in Allison that are not normally present in a non-Synaesthete. Being propensity of the Synaesthetic is akin to being "inclined", as in MUSICALLY inclined or mechanically inclined. Allison has always been MUSICALLY/VUSICALLY inclined as a result of being Synaesthete.

The experience with the spectrum in 1956 and MUSICAL and graphic skills that Allison aquired in the years between 1957 and 1967, found Allison in Houston, Texas. where he was CEO of Prelude Art Studios, Mediassociate Advertising Agency, and The Mob Modeling Group, a full survice advertising organization with a number of major clients.

At the time, the highest tech way of doing presentations in the advertising industry was the slide presentation and Allison worked in conjunction with the late, great Vilhelm Wolfhagen, the famous Viking photographer from Denmark, doing slide presentations to and for clients in the Houston advertising market. In doing this kind of thing, slide projectors were the means of making the images visible to a moderately large number of people in an audience.

The technology to produce these slide shows was right on the cusp of going to computer control, for in fact, it was controlled by a rudimentary computer, with the program on paper tape with holes punched in it. The changing of slides and the dissolving from one image to the next was the height of "cool" and if you couldn't do that, the really posh accounts would buy from those who had presentations that would completely overshadow a less high-tech presentation.

Mediassociates had just acquired a Spindler Sauppe 1200SLR Ultrabright system. It was "spiffy"! Big bright pictures, dissolves that happened over any length of time. Flawless reliability. Big! Heavy! (and one of them is still running, the other being destroyed in a fire).

One day while working on a project, Allison noticed the beam of LIGHT that came out of the projector and put his hand through the beam in a sweeping motion and amazingly, the image being projected on the screen appeared and persisted for an instant in mid-air! It was startling!

The slide that was in the projector was the flag of the United States of American, beautifully furled and flowing against an almost midnight Blue sky. And there it was right there in mid-air! Allison was startled and did the sweeping motion again and the image of the Stars and Stripes appeared again and persisted for an instant and then was gone. The third time that Allison put his hand into the LIGHT, he just stuck his hand in the LIGHT beam and there on his hand was a portion of the flag as the image of the flag on the slide came out of the lens of the then state-of-the-art, SpindlerSauppe 200SLR with Ultrabright. The secret to seeing the whole image suspended in mid-air is to "sweep" an object such as a White plastic rod through the image and one's retina retention will make the image persist for just an instant. It is imperative that the source of LIGHT be bright enough to cause this effect. The image, of course, is never all there in the air, it is just the overloading of the eye that causes the lingering of the image.

The fascination with seeing what else would happen if... and here all kinds of things began to come into play.

For example, the idea of keeping secret what one is doing led to the idea that those watching the images should not be able to see how the images are being made (more about that concept later). The solution at the time was to project the images on one side of a White bed-sheet suspended in a double door-way between a dining room and a living room. The sheet would later be replaced by PolaCoat LensScreen, a rear projection material made especially for rear projection technology.

There was experimentation with such things as putting aluminum colander in the LIGHT beam and finding that every hole made an identical image of the whole picture on the screen.

The use of chandelier crystal and cut glass plates and faceted lenses and odd shaped transparent objects such as paperweights were all experimented with.

In all its niave crudeness, the beginning still held enough promise, that the seed that had been planted in Allison's mind, at the time of the spectrum in the high school auditorium, and, the germinating of the seed with the acquisition of LIGHT producing equipment and then the sprouting of the idea as concepts started to jell.

Different objects do different things to LIGHT. It just so happens that what can be done is to: Refract; Reflect; Diffract; and Diffuse LIGHT. Each is done in a different way and by a different class of object (more about that in the chapter on Concept), but the formulation of an orderly classification of what did what was still some amount of time in the future.

Allison very quickly got quite efficient at checking and testing objects for their optical characteristics. And in the process, he came to intuitively understand that some of the objects had more facility than others.

It was while showing the various things and their effects to his friends that the very first attempts were made to correspond the visual effects that were being made projected onto the screen with the SOUND of a record being played on the stereo SOUND system that was part of the presentation equipment.

Being MUSICALLY trained and being able to play Guitar and Piano, Allison already had the ability to "groove" with the rhythm. The doing of it with LIGHT was thus not that big of a step and thus was born the idea of VUSIC in the conceptual mindscape of Allison.

There was to his knowledge, no others who were doing this kind of thing. Allison later found out that there was already a tradition and history for working with LIGHT and that the concept of making it emulate MUSIC existed, but at the time of his actual first inkling of the kind of thing that he had "discovered", he was totally unaware of what others had done except for perhaps, three events that made him realize that while he was quite original in what he was doing, what he was doing was not unique to him alone.

The first of these events was the Disney movie "Fantasia".

The second of these events took place in Dallas, Texas. Allison had wandered into an art gallery that was having a late night art exhibit. It was a Drummer who was in fact a world class purcussionist, with hair down to the small of his back, really cooking on a well equipped medium large set of Drums and Cymbals.

Now this in itself was nothing new, but with the addition of a really powerful strobe LIGHT and a color wheel, along with a device that instead of the strobe going off automatically it was triggered by any one of the drum SOUNDS, and this was apparently either set to function randomly or it was being operated by someone because it never fell into a repetitive pattern for very long.

Another thing that made it unusual was that the color wheel appeard to "step" instead of rotate at any given rpm. The result of this setup was that the purcussionist, without having a shirt on and either coated with oil or maybe sweat, so that his torso and face and arms glistened, would work out on the drums, throwing his hair as part of the rhythmic moves necessary to play the drums, and the strobe would flash in sync with the rhythm and the colors would change image to image and the images were so bright that they would overlap at times due to retinal retention. It was a very effective display and Allison was affected and moved by it.

The third of these events was when Kenan Branam, the veteran/expert TV producer, who was then working for Goodwin, Dannenbaum, Littman and Wingfield advertising agency in Houston, Greg Harber, a sales representative for K-LOL Radio in Houston, and Allison in his capacity of handling the Brake Check Brake Centers advertising account came into contact to handle the production and placement of an advertising campaign.

It was Branam that would bring to Allison's attention the impending appearance of the first Video Cassette and Playback Device called the Sony U-Matic 3/4" Cassette Deck. The comment was made at the time, that "We should figure out how to make something that could be marketed on that format.".

The discussion progressed as to how to accomplish it. Branam said that there were already people doing what was called "Video Space" which was recording on videotape the things that happened when one did such things as aim a camera at a monitor and by moving the camera, altering the focus and zoom and tilting the monitor, that one could create the visual effect that would be the equivalents of audio feedback or delay. One could also alter the chroma of the signal and there were available a number of effects from the special effects generator that was part of the mixer equipment that was used in the production of television programming.

But it became clear to Allison that the VUSIC was not in the Video recording system any more than the MUSIC is in the Audio recording system. An Audio recording system has certain capabilities to produce SOUND, but they are seldom used in MUSIC production. Normally MUSIC is made on a MUSIC instrument and recorded on the Audio recording system. Thus Allison came to the conclusion that a VUSIC instrument that would do to a Video recording system what a MUSIC instrument does to an Audio recording system was what was needed.

Allison thus formulated the components necessary to do this.

In Optics, the assemblage of instruments which comprise the path that LIGHT takes in the system is called a "chain".

At the projection end of the chain of The Crystalume is a LIGHT producing source which permits coloring the LIGHT before it exits the lens into the first of two areas, which Allison calls "Negative Zone". It goes through a Vexo/Convexo lens and into a "Positive Zone", which is separated from the Negative Zone by the V/C lens. At the end of this chain is a rear projection screen which the LIGHT from the source is shown on one side and the audience watches from the other side.

From the time that the LIGHT leaves the lens till it hits the screen, it passes through various lenses, prismatic objects, filters, and irises, all of which are physically manipulated by the VUSICIAN to produce: The change of color in sympathy with the change of tone in the Audio; the flow of the brilliance which gets brighter and dimmer as the MUSIC gets louder and quieter; the rhythmic strobing equivalent of the Audio rhythm section of the SOUND; the progression and regression of the images as the SOUND proceeds and receeds; and other factors, too numerous to list or detail as combinations of these actions begin to manifest.

The resultant image that the audience sees is extremely facile. The problem is not making it go, quite the contrary, the problem is keeping it from getting away!

Every motion, every little change in the position of any of the optical elements is amplified and made glaringly apparent! Learning to manipulate the elements takes practice and repetition, but, little by little, more and more control is gained and even though at times it is completely out of control, it is still beautiful!

So there it was! The Mighty Crystalume! The latest and probably the most like a MUSIC instrument VUSIC instrument that had ever been devised. Now to build the thing!

The Crystalume was originally an adjustable height platform made from an ironing board! This setup became a booth with the addition of partitions around the projection system and the screen comprising the front of the booth. This then became an enclosure that encompassed only the limits that the LIGHT hitting the screen would define. These limits were ascertained by stretching strings inside the booth at the limits of any LIGHT on the screen.

Having done this, Allison then proceeded to produce a free standing instrument of the shape of the strings stretched in the booth and was thus relieved of the burden of carrying a huge booth.

There were at times, concepts such as having an inflatable screen with the projection system inside, but none of these kind of development were ever actually produced.

At present, Allison's concert screen is 6'-6" x 10'-0" Which is bigger than most large screen televisions. It is a self-standing screen, on which can play up to five Crystalumes.

Allison performs solo and with Jeane Zekowski Doane, of The Eyedream of Jeane Concert Lightshow, a student of Allison's.

The method that designing The Crystalume took was to determine what would work as far as having an optical system that gave control of the volume of LIGHT, the color of LIGHT, the rate of strobe, the placement of image position, control of the motion, and an infinite spectrum of variation as components are manipulated through the various arrangements of the choreography of the LIGHT controlling elements.

The device that could do this would have as its purpose the programming of Video tape and disk and would be used as entertainment.

Between the years of 1967 and 1971, The Allison Wonderland Concert Lightshow played all around the Southwest to the Northwest of the Continental United States.

In 1972, Allison opened The Allison Wonderland Theatre on world famous Knox Street in Dallas, Texas. The old Knox Street Theatre was renovated and twin 15'0" x 15'-0" screens were installed.

The concept was this: There would be MUSIC coming out of the giant (Klipsche) sound system. There would be silent, Black and White movies such as Buster Keeton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, on the Right screen. And there would be Lightshow on the Left screen. The concept was this: There would be Lightshow to the MUSIC. The MUSIC would be edited to fit the movie.

It then it became the responsibility of those in the audience who could do it to learn how to cross one's eyes to make the screens overlap and thus one would see three images. The one on the Left would be the Lightshow. The one on the Right would be the movie. The one in the center would be the Lightshow and movie overlaid. The VUSICIANS tried to maintain corresponding shapes with the composition of the movie, and corresponding rhythm and motion of the MUSIC. When it was right, it was exquisite!

The demise of the Allison Wonderland Theatre came about by the most circuitous of technical difficulties. So, on The Allison Wonderland went to Houston.

In 1973, Mr. H.A. Lott, CEO and founder of H.A. Lott, Inc., Contractors and Engineers, builders of the Astrodome, a long time friend and patron of Allison agreed to fund a professional recording of The Crystalume at a major TV studio in Houson.

It was there that it was first seen by those in the TV industry and Allison, along with Branam and The Allison Wonderland Concert Lightshow executive co-ordinator, Mary-k Ashley Wilson, were approached about producing the "Sensatiation" television program which was simulcast by K-101 Radio and Channel 26 KPFT.

This program was sponsored by the Globe Discount City Record Centers whose advertising agency was Bob Adams Advertising. There were 6 half hour programs produced and aired. It was an instant hit and it was only through the most circuitous of technical difficulties that it was not possible to continue.

It was at this time that The Crystalume changed from being a booth to being a stand-alone instrument. The first stand-alone Crystalume was built partially in the workshop at the Channel 26 Television Station in 1973. This particular Crystalume was destroyed along with one of the two SS1200 SLR projectors in a fire that destroyed almost all of Allison's equipment on January 8, 1981.

In the years between 1973 and 1981, Allison did numerous shows around the country.

After the fire in 1981, Allison went to his father's place in Cherry Valley, California and rebuilt the entire Crystalume system with added features and abilities. It became more portable. It was light and compact and the Mark II Crystalume is the finest of all The Crystalumes that are presently in existence. At last count there were eight that had been known to be in existence at one time. Whether they still are is unknown as of this writing.

In 1981, after finishing the rebuilding of The Crystalume system to replace the one destroyed in the fire, Allison took a job as a television producer/public relations director of an oil production industry equipment manufacturer. The company was one of the casualties of the oil bust that took place in the late 1980s and on April 1, 1987, Allison was un-employed by the closing of the company.

On April 21, 1987, Allison was involved in a catastrophic motorcycle/automobile collision that left him with a broken hip and a crushed right foot. Since that time, Allison has continued to develop the LUMIC Art of VUSIC while also pursuing the trade of producing commercial art with the aid of computer technology.

The Allison Wonderland Conservatory of VUSIC is well underway and soon there will be the announcement of a number of projects that are being negotiated even as this is being written.

Allison is also in contact with a number of very talented people who are involved in the Internet scene in New York City. These are artists who used to work with Allison in the early years who have gone on in their own careers to become if not the superstars, at least those behind the scenes who make it possible and in many instances actually responsible for those who are the superstars.

Allison lives a life of seclusion in the Deep East Texas Piney Woods Forest in a little resort town known as Onalaska, nestled at the East end of the Hwy 190 Bridge across the mighty Trinity River. Though he does most of his work on the computer and with a connection to the Internet, Allison is continually advancing on some front that is related to The Allison Wonderland Concert Lightshow, The Eyedream of Jeane Concert Lightshow, Creative Focus, which is the graphics division of the process.

And as a bit of a favor to a number of people, Allison does what is called Confidential Investigative Assessments, which is the searching out and compiling of information on anything from a completely neutral point of view. In this way, Allison is able to supply information on any given subject from all involved viewpoints. The purpose of this is to find out what is being done and to ascertain whether a given idea is worth pursuing in light of what else is being done along those lines.

Allison is occasionally induced to leave his solitudinous routines in the forest to foray into one of the surrounding metropolitan areas to perform for some particular function. If you have never seen The Allison Wonderland Concert Lightshow, you have a real treat in store.

In addition, there has been some amount of progress made toward the design and production of The Crystalume Mark III. With a custom designed LIGHT production system that is lighter and more versatile than the slide projector system presently in use. Recent advancement in LIGHT producing devices have made available greater amounts of brighter and Whiter LIGHT, while reducing the weight, temperature, and physical restraints that preclude motion and angular displacement of the bulb from the horizontal plane.

As this aspect of the project takes place, those who want to obtain and learn how to play The Crystalume, will be able to get a Crystalume and study with Allison on a one-to-one basis to learn how to play it.

The study plan is designed to make it possible for the aspiring VUSICIAN to learn how to play The Crystalume and to understand the relationship of SOUND to LIGHT and to understand the philosophies of LUMIA and VUSIC. The use of a skill such as this is going to be as ubiquitious to the production of entertainment in the future as the skill of being a MUSICIAN is ubiquitous to the production of entertainment today.

If you have any comments, questions or would like more information email, you can E-Mail Jeane at <vusicalumiast@yahoo.com>

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Tell your friends about it. You can never tell, this might be something that you would like to do yourself.