actual project

I’ve not updated the site for a while, but I’ve also finished the piece for Zubin Kanga now, as part of his Cyborg Soloists project. The piece is called just trying to do what I’m told and keep up and do the best that I can and puts the pianist in an increasingly difficult situation where they are asked to respond to a series of instructions which get progressively harder to follow. The piece reflects on the experience of managing situations where the flow of information and requirement to respond accurately and efficiently becomes overly taxing and impossible to maintain. In these situations, coping strategies might be developed to find a manageable solution or to accept defeat. In the piece, artificial voices are fed text instructions to create live-generated sequences that are not known in advance by the pianist, forcing them to respond to each instruction as they hear it. The unforgiving nature of the artificial voices delivering instructions with no accountability or reciprocity with the human player aims to reflect on situations where control is beyond us but we must still complete the arbitrary tasks we are given.

The piece uses an app that has had a few different versions. Starting with a Max patch that linked to voice control on a Mac, the app could generate instructions and respond so some simple user input. I later developed this as a Python app using Claude (before making the eurorack modules) which worked pretty well, but was apparently impossible to port to any other machine (it took longer to try that than making it in the first place). So I just made it as a web app instead and it’s so much better being browser based. It generates instructions by type according to a text score that structures a version. It can play music, samples, generate audio, and the player can talk to it to ask for advice on playing the piece. We’re just beginning to rehearse it now and it will be performed soon.

This has opened up a whole new way of working for me and I’m developing some other pieces that draw on the programming. Hopefully something for an event at the Arnolfini in Bristol in November.