SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Music to Look at : Joyce Lightbody begins compositions not with her ears but with her eyes.

For most musicians and composers, it is the actual sound of music that lures them into its secret realm. For Joyce Lightbody, Malibu-based visual artist and composer, it was the sight.

“Throughout my life,” she said recently, “musical notation--the visual aspect of it--has completely fascinated me, along with other kinds of notation, patterning and maps. I grew up as a minister’s daughter and had to go to church every Sunday. I learned very early on that I could amuse myself by reading the hymnal.”

Lightbody will be returning to church Saturday, when her ensemble of four vocalists and two instrumentalists performs a Santa Barbara concert of her songs from the past decade. The concert, in the city’s historically significant and acoustically reverberant Presidio Chapel, is being presented in connection with the Contemporary Arts Forum’s current “Addictions” exhibition.

The church connection also relates to Lightbody’s musical leanings. The texts for her pieces are everything but religious in origin, culled from obscure poems, newspaper clippings, nonsensical syllabic constructions and other sources. But the purity of the choral sound and the liturgical air of her music make it an intriguing cultural crossbreed. It is music of the church by way of art school, a mixture of self-taught medievalism and post-modernist mindset.

A visual artist and teacher at schools such as the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, Lightbody has recorded her songs on a 1987 record, “Bears Ears and Other Songs,” and two other self-produced tapes released in the past two years. But really, the sonic aspect is only the final stage of her artwork, which begins with her personal graphic technique of creating a score.

“My composition process is visual, to begin with,” Lightbody said. “It has to do with this pleasure I have in mapping and graphing and plotting and reorganizing, taking things apart and putting them back together again. That’s what I do for myself in the studio as a way of giving myself associations and structures which I then turn into the scores and the music.”

It was while studying fine arts in the ‘70s, a time of transition and conceptual upheaval in the art world, that Lightbody’s aesthetic sense of direction began taking shape. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies in 1974, but didn’t start refining her musical expression until the ‘80s.

“As I started working as a visual artist, I became turned on to John Cage and Steve Reich very early,” she said. “That triggered in me a sense that music was a direction I could go in. Cage gave everybody the permission to pursue their wildest dreams.”

Lightbody’s personal dreams included investigating her interests in “mapping and organizing information in one dimension and then translating it into another dimension.”

Though her process is experimental, her product is accessible and her musical language tonal.

“I’m a sucker for four-part harmony,” she confessed. “There’s something in me that has to go for that engaging quality in my music. I don’t write really cool music. It may get funny and very cynical in terms of the language, but what you’re listening to is not emotionally cool.”

She paused and then clarified: “I don’t mean to say it’s sentimental, but I like the idea that you can sit in a room, hear the music and remember that the human voice is still a beautiful thing. Being touched by sounds around you is important in a world where so much sound is technocratic.”

Although Lightbody’s music has elicited praise from critics, she said she often feels alienated from the alternative/conceptual world of new music.

“It’s partly because I deal with a medieval sense of harmony,” she said, “because I’m not taking technology to its furthest extent, that I’m going back to the human voice, and also that I will let the human voice sing actual words.”

She feels that her perspective is different from most new music makers. “I come from the visual arts, where various movements have been concerned with representation and what that means in art. In the past 10 years, deconstruction has come in and representation means something completely new. I think that has had an influence on me; language, too, can represent something else.”

Finances permitting, Lightbody envisions grander projects with larger ensembles. Among her future works is a commission for the UCSB carillon next spring. She plans to adapt existing carillon music with aspects of rock and soul music. During the same time, her visual scores will be on display in the UCSB Art Museum.

But Lightbody said she is still committed to her current vocal ensemble, made up of Santa Barbarans Jan Duggan, Tessa Flanagan, Kirk Taylor and Duff Kennedy with keyboardist Dick Dunlap, percussionist Tom Lackner and conductor Arlene Dunlap.

“I write this stuff and it’s interesting on paper, but it’s nothing until they sing it,” Lightbody said, “and they know my language very well. I can’t sing it. I am not the dictator composer. It really is collaborative when it comes to the rehearsal stage.”

And when it comes to performance, finding the right audience isn’t always easy.

“When you do what I do, you’re a bafflement to a lot of people. In the art and music worlds, I’m kind of a hybrid and a fluke,” Lightbody said.

“I have a very supportive group of mostly visual and literary people who keep me alive and say, ‘We believe in what you’re doing.’ There are those days when you think, ‘Oh my gosh, why should I be doing this? Maybe I should be potato farming somewhere.’ ”

For now, however, the potato industry will have to go on without her.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Songs on an Autumn Evening” by Joyce Lightbody will be performed at the Presidio Chapel, 123 E. Canon Perdido, in Santa Barbara on Saturday at 8 p.m. Admission is $8, or $5 for Contemporary Arts Forum members, students and seniors. For more information, call 966-5373.