Blog - Lumlux Art

The Piano Shares Control

Quayola and Seta’s Transient is an audiovisual concert for two motorized pianos and video projection. The performers improvise with complex algorithms that generate musical and visual structures in real time. The piano is recognizably acoustic, but it no longer represents a protected human tradition standing opposite the machine.
Because the instruments are motorized, the boundary between performance and automation remains visible. Keys move, hammers strike and acoustic bodies resonate, even when algorithmic processes participate in the decisions. The mechanism becomes part of the image. Unlike a software piano hidden inside a computer, these instruments displace air in the same room as the audience.
The word transient is especially precise here. In audio, a transient is the brief attack that gives a sound its definition. In the concert, every generated event is also temporary, one outcome selected from many possibilities. The projection makes those decisions perceptible as changing structures rather than translating each note into a decorative flash.
For audiovisual work, this offers a stronger model than synchronization alone. Sound and image can share a rule without displaying the same event. A rhythmic density might influence the fragmentation of the image while pitch shapes spatial position. The relationship remains legible, but neither medium becomes a subtitle for the other.
The credits reveal how collective such an apparently self-generating work actually is. Software developers, sound-tool designers, an orchestrator and production collaborators all contributed to the system. The algorithms perform, but they do so inside an instrument assembled through many human decisions.

Transient

#Quayola #Transient #AlgorithmicMusic #GenerativeVisuals #MechanicalPiano

The Piano Shares Control QUAYOLA Transient - QUAYOLA Artist - Algorithmic Poetics / Robotic Sculpting / New Landscape Paintings

A Piano Playing Beyond Human Hands

Conlon Nancarrow spent much of his working life composing for player piano because the machine could perform rhythmic relationships that human pianists could barely reproduce.

Between 1948 and 1984 he created more than fifty Studies for Player Piano. Instead of writing music and hoping performers could realise it, Nancarrow punched the musical information directly into paper rolls.

That changed what composition could demand.

Several independent tempos could accelerate or decelerate simultaneously. Rhythmic canons could unfold at ratios too exact and too fast for ordinary performance. The limitation was no longer the pianist’s hands.

The machine became the performer.

Nancarrow even permanently altered his pianos, modifying their hammers and damping systems to make the complicated textures clearer.

I find this fascinating because it anticipates something electronic musicians now take for granted.

A DAW can execute an impossible MIDI sequence without asking whether a person can physically play it.

Nancarrow reached that freedom through mechanical technology decades earlier.

But there is an important difference.

His player piano is not silent computation. Pumps, motors, paper rolls, keys and hammers are physically struggling to execute the information.

You can hear the machine working.

It is algorithmic music with muscles.

https://www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/research/1-2-Conlon-Nancarrow-Edition-project.html

#ConlonNancarrow #PlayerPiano #AlgorithmicMusic #Composition

A Piano Playing Beyond Human Hands paul-sacher-stiftung.ch Paul Sacher Stiftung - 2016-21 Conlon Nancarrow: Towards a Critical Edition Conlon Nancarrow spent much of his working life composing for player piano because the machine could perform rhythmic relationships that human...