Tele-Harmonium

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for piano and UT3OSC

Backstory

The Tele-Harmonium is a building-sized virtual instrument.

Avatar is the caretaker/keeper of sorts of this building/instrument; he loads it with music and plays it to keep it working/alive and to keep the memories alive. Think symbiotic relationship between avatar and building.

In the center of the instrument/building is a ghostly representation of a pianist and piano (think hologram from Star Wars. glitchy, hazy, foggy

Snippets of Italian sources (Scarlatti, Sonata For Keyboard in D Minor, K.213 (L.108) "The Lover") serve as the source materials that the caretaker feeds into the instrument, audible as mashed-up audio clips at the beginning of the piece. The hologram is a representation perhaps of a loved one, the ghost of a performer.

The pianist in real-life in the concert hall is the physical representation of this ghost, serving as an inverted flash-back of sorts, a physical memory-made-real from the virtual world. Playing the Tele-Harmonium keeps the memory and the music alive.

The virtual performer "loads" these works into the Tele-Harmonium and it generates a performance, played out in real life as a duet between live pianist and virtual instrument, controlled by avatar. Cells extracted from the source materials act as starter cells, which the avatar introduces into the system and are played in whole, then followed by materials compositionally derived from the source cells. When the system/music deviates too far past the avatar's liking, he reintroduces material into the system, which then again begins the cycle of derivation and reintroduction anew.

Source harmonic materials for the Tele-Harmonium sections are derived compositionally from reductions of the original Italian sources.

Key final presentation, post-MiTo would be a Machinima film combining story-line (silent i.e. no dialog), programmed camera sequences and mixed down audio (5.1, 7.1) which can serve as a great show-piece for the artists involved.

Sources

Scarlatti

Sonata For Keyboard in D Minor, K.213 (L.108) "The Lover"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8r032CNx5M

SC Sound Options

http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/aeolus/index.html