• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.615-624
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• 2020

By enabling musicians to freely control the elements involved in sound production and tone generation with a variety of timbre, synthesizers have revolutionized and permanently changed music since the 1960s. Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, a masterpiece of video art maestro Nam June Paik, is a prominent example of re-interpretation of this new musical instrument in the realm of video and audio. This article examines Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer as an innovative instrument to play videos from the perspective of audiovisual art, and establishes its aesthetic value and significance through both artistic and technical analysis. The instrument, which embodied the concept of image sampling and real-time interactive video as an image-based multi-channel music production tool, contributed to establishing a new relationship between sound and image within the realm of audiovisual art. The fact that his video synthesizer not only adds image to sound, but also presents a complete fusion of image and sound as an image instrument with musical characteristics, becomes highly meaningful in this age of synesthesia.