Fischinger drew music: charcoal studies pulsing to Brahms, Composition in Blue’s dancing geometry, An Optical Poem (1938) made of paper cutouts swinging to Liszt at MGM. His synchronization was so exact audiences assumed machinery where there was patience.
He emigrated from Nazi Germany to Hollywood, worked briefly and unhappily on Disney’s Fantasia, and kept producing independent films and paintings while inventing the Lumigraph, a performed instrument of colored light.
Every beat-locked motion graphic descends from his practice. When visualizer culture talks about hits causing visual events, it is restating what Fischinger demonstrated frame by frame, by hand, in the 1930s.