As a creative, this question has puzzled me for more than a decade. I have travelled extensively between Europe and South Africa to find an answer that is elegant, succinct and practical. And during my travels, I've discovered that there are essentially two approaches to best visually depict an audible art form.

The first approach is the live performance depiction. Here a musician is photographed in a performance setting such as a festival or an event. The objective is to capture the impact the artist's music is having on his or her environment. Typically, this includes a selection of shots that show the artist with their instrument while they are performing on stage in front of an audience. Key aspects that need to be paid attention to is setting and ambience. Setting relates to permanent fixtures such as stage structure and set decorations. Ambience focuses more on variable features such as lighting, choreographed stage performances and of course the emotional response of the audience. These elements combined with subtle post-production techniques make for truly vivid imagery.

The second approach is a bit more abstract and requires a basic understanding of music, art and motion picture theory. Here the photographer uses an academic approach to create a visual world that elicits the same emotional response as the musical composition. The audience needs to visually comprehend the emotional journey the music is about to take them on.