composition – Artificial Intelligence

20 Etudes for Piano by Philip Glass

Gregor Tatschl — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:00:02 +0000

Maki Namekawa (JP), Cori Olan (AT)

The Twenty Etudes for Piano were composed during the years from 1991 to 2012. Their final configuration into Book 1 and Book 2 was determined by the music itself in the course of its composition. Taken together, they suggest a real trajectory that includes a broad range of music and technical ideas. In the end, the etudes are intended to be appreciated not only by the general listener, but especially by those who have the ability and patience to learn, play and perform the music themselves.

20 Etudes for 20 Etudes

Twenty real-time parameter-driven visualizations for Philip Glass’s Twenty Etudes for Piano performed by Maki Namekawa

The visualizations can be considered as etudes themselves, exploring visual and time-based relationships between basic topics like pattern and form, symbol and language as well as time and space, motion and position. Most of the pieces work with real-time-generated CGI, with a strong and immediate response to the music based on a comprehensive analysis of the audio signal from two microphones close to the piano. Some are combinations of CGI with photography or video and two use only video but with variations in the playback speed and the triggering of cue points controlled by the live music.

The visualizations, quite like the etudes themselves, have not been developed in their numerical sequence, but when we started to perform the complete etudes most visualizations were modified and some were completely remade to create a more intuitive flow.

The complete set of all twenty visualized etudes was premiered in February 2017 at National Sawdust, New York.

our audible/profitable economy/exhibition

Gregor Tatschl — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 20:19:54 +0000

Niek Hilkmann (NL), Joseph Knierzinger (AT), Michael Johannes Muik (AT)

In our audible/profitable economy/exhibition financial microtransactions are transformed into extra tonal sound structures. The exhibition consists of several coin-operated machines, each dedicated to a specific sonic event.

Every visitor is invited to hear the different sounds, to accept the cost of production and to become part of the art industry. When an investment is made in all the machines at the same time they will perform one superior composition.

All the machines are part of the collection of the artist-led nothing more foundation (nm), which decided to distribute these automatons to various cultural organizations, in order to collect micropayments that will be used to support other artistic activities that create more coin-operated artworks.

Credits

nothing more foundation (Hilkmann, Knierzinger, Muik, et al.)

Interludium A, Isang Yun 3 Etudes for Piano, Philip Glass

Gregor Tatschl — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 09:59:23 +0000

Maki Namekawa (JP), Cori Olan (AT)

Two birthdays constitute the background to the selection of these pieces—the 100th birthday of Insang Yun, the Korean composer who died in 1995, and Phillip Glass’s 80th. Interludium A was created in 1982, two years after the democracy movement in Gwangju was crushed. This was a matter of profound concern to Isang Yun, who in the late 1960s, had himself been victimized by the political despotism of the military regime in power at the time.

“A composer cannot view the world in which he lives with indifference. Human suffering, oppression, injustice . . . all that comes to me in my thoughts. Where there is pain, where there is injustice, I want to have my say through my music.” – Isang Yun, 1983

The real-time visualization of this piece has its point of departure in visual associations with the sheet music, and rises up into a complex geometric structure, the individual elements of which are then infused with dynamic movement by parameters derived directly from the live sound of the piano—like a huge high-rise complex or construction plans for a futuristic urban machine that, with passages becoming softer and softer, descends into a dark nocturnal mood, from the depths of which tonal colorations and elements evocative of Asian calligraphy repeatedly emerge. Three of Philip Glass’s 20 Etudes for Piano will be performed as a sort of teaser for the big solo concert on Monday.