Sonar Piano Migration
Video of performance at Echo Location, OFS Studio Theatre, Oxford, October 2008.
In collaboration with Matthew Olden (aka “i am the mighty jungulator“). Matthew makes software that digitally manipulates sound and image on the fly, using manual controls, but also employing a certain amount of controlled randomness. For a performance at the event Echo Location, I invited Matthew to devise a way of controlling his software by using data gathered from the journeys the audience had made that evening. Piano Migration VI does just this to create a surround-sound composition from a live piano improvisation (by myself) based on a fugue by Lithuanian composer Ciurlionis. (See Piano Migrations Ia, Ib, Ic)
Before the concert, members of the audience were asked to plot on a map the starting position of the journey they made that evening. These points were plotted on a radar display and map to be used as triggering points for the piano sounds to be sampled and re-shaped. The radar/map image is projected during the performance, allowing the audience to relate the trigger-points on the map to new sounds being moved around the space, thus making the sonification of the map data readable during the performance.
