March 4, 2005 See What You Hear Take a big, open warehouse-type room and turn down the lights. Crank up the music and add a graphics-driven light show. What have you got? A night club? Not exactly. Now through May 22nd, the Museum of Contemporary Art is holding an exhibit called Visual Music that has appeal for the club kid in all of us. If your previous museum experiences have included standing motionless before masterpiece after masterpiece, head cocked, mouth agape, awaiting a wave of understanding to wash over you, this might be just the art event you've been looking for. Most of the rooms are dark caverns with some sort of light display. Works range from graphical images projected on floors and walls, to full-blown films of animated graphics set to music. The works that don't incorporate sound still revolve in some way around music. More than one room is devoted to painted interpretations of musical genres. (So that's what jazz looks like!) If you've been to MOCA before, you know it's not a big space and you might be tempted to give yourself only a little time to breeze through the whole exhibit. This would be a mistake. Many of the spaces are set up as screening rooms showing multiple films on a loop. To take it all in you'll want to stay a while. If Visual Music doesn't give you a deeper appreciation for the relationship between sound and art, at the very least it might inspire you to do a little clubbing. Information on the Visual Music exhibit is available at the MOCA Web site.