Google Doodle honours visual artist Oskar Fischinger on 117th birthday

Google, today, has released a Doodle to celebrate the 117th birthday of Oskar Fischinger, the German-American artist, musician and filmmaker who created incredible works of animated art set to music.

To mark the day, the search engine invites you to make your own visual music composition. The Google Doodle with Fischinger's famous quote, Music is not limited to the world of sound. There exists a music of the visual world.

It then leads to a page where you can visually compose music by selecting dots on an 11x16 grid. Each dot represents a note, and you can select between four different "instruments." The composition is played on loop.

In the world of design, wrote Google's Leon Hong in a blog post, Fischinger is a towering figure, especially in the areas of motion graphics and animation. He is best known for his ability to combine impeccably synchronized abstract visuals with musical accompaniment, each frame carefully drawn or photographed by hand. A master of motion and color, Fischinger spent months, sometimes years , planning and handcrafting his animations.

Oskar Fischinger created special effects for Fritz Lang's 1929 'Woman In The Moon', one of the first sci-fi rocket movies ever produced. He made over 50 short films and painted around 800 canvases that find a place in museums, galleries and collections across the globe. Fischinger left Nazi Germany in 1936 for Hollywood as Adolf Hitler cracked down on abstract art.

He died in 1967 but to this day many of his works are in the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles.