Whim (2016)

Whim is about sitting at the piano. I think much of my work comes from sitting at the piano as a kid. Not playing the piano so much as sitting at it, with it. Waiting to see what it would give back. Sitting at the piano, I play a chord. With the strength in my back I strike mechanical energy dormant in its tension and release the weight into air. And then I wait, and I sit at the piano, and I listen for the tidal response of overtones to wash back to me, or fall like snow, or flakes of charred of paper, or run like a rogue grain trickling down the surface of a sandcastle. And me as a kid, I’d just sit and listen and widen out my ears until the last flicker flicked into silence. Whim is an ode to that cascade. To that reciprocation.

Whim was created using a live piano performance and granular processing. I tried to capture the overtones of a solo piano recording using convolution and granular processing to distill the extended envelopes of the instruments resonance from its fundamentals and transients.

Analog video feedback, unrelated other than in motion