Piano conversations

Piano conversations

After recording some improvisations using my current system involving the mechanical midi piano, I felt the urge to engage in a more direct musical dialogue with the material I was creating. I made these short piano duos with the mechanical piano part played by a physical modeling software piano through transducers mounted on the piano soundboard (duo #3 also uses mechanical piano action). Responding to the speech generated musical material, I played the piano improvising gestures in a manner similar to the compositional and arrangement devices implemented in the software. The arranging of the mechanical part itself is also improvised in real time.
 
Piano duo 1:

 
Piano duo 2:

 
Piano duo 3:

 
This felt like bridging the two different musical realms – that of speech prosody and that of improvised musical group interaction, and thus adding the musical touch lacking in some of my earlier very machine-like translations of speech prosody into music. This way it becomes a musical dialogue indeed, both between speech and that of music but also between man and machine.