Karlheinz Essl
The Untempered Piano
interactive sound installation / meta instrumentIn Honor of Jean-Sebastièn Bach (1685-1750)
2000
Commissioned by the City of Vienna (Austria) for the Bach-Year 2000
Commissioned by the City of Vienna (Austria) for the Bach-Year 2000
Excerpt of The Untempered Piano
© 2000 by Karlheinz Essl
The Untempered Piano is an interactive sound installation that has been created by Karlheinz Essl for the Bach exhibition at the Museum of Technology in Vienna, Austria. It was commissioned by the City of Vienna for the Bach Year 2000.
By clicking with the mouse on the colored circles and the piano keyboard on the computer screen, the user can compose an individual version of this infinite piece. If no user interaction has taken place for 15 seconds, the program will switch to an auto creation mode where it starts composing and playing on its own. Whenever the mouse is moved, this autonomous process is stopped and the user can play with the mouse like on an instrument.
This infinite piece is being composed in realtime due to user interaction. Written in Max/MSP, it takes advantage of compositional algorithms that have been developed by Karlheinz Essl since the middle 1980s utilizing random operations, serial and stochastic procedures: bundled in the so-called RTC-lib.
The Untempered Piano is based on piano sounds opposed to the world of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Well-Tempered Piano". It focusses on those domains that has been banished in the traditional piano music: strange, noisy and crackling sounds produced by treating the instrument with tools like horse hair, coins, chains, rubber gum, plektron etc. The "normal" piano sound - achieved by playing with fingers on the keyboard - has been completely abandoned.
Graphical user interface of The Untempered Piano
© 2000 by Karlheinz Essl
Eight different structure generators form the conceptual basis of the piece which generate music according to certain compositional algorithms:
DRONES
Long sustained sounds - mostly in a low transposition with slow fade in and fade out. By steadily superimposing drones one can create virtually everlasting sounds.
PLANES
Sustained sounds in various transpositions.
POINTS
Short and accentuated "pointillistic" events which occur in three different forms:
GRIDS
Sounds with an inner rhythmical pulsation such as trills, tremolos, and textures.
FIRE
Loud attacks achieved by playing several mostly short sounds together.
REPEAT
Selected percussive sound are repeated with a constant pulsation, fading in and out. Each time the colored circle is clicked, another layer with its own pulsation speed is created. By superimposing several rhythmical layers one can create extemly complex rhythmical structures.
FIGURE
A gesture created by repeating a percussive sound either as an accelerando or a ritardando. The transposition of the sound follows a certain curve that is obtained by a random- driven algorithm.
PULSE
One or several percussive piano sounds are placed on an even rhythmical grid which can be "excavated" by rests.
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Updated: 27 Dec 2006