Pianographique
Pianographique is a series of collaborations of real time visual artist Cori O’Lan and Maki Namekawa. The visualisations are not videos that are more or less synchronous to the music and it is also not the musician’s playing to prefabricated material, they are jointly created together in the moment of the performance. As with most of Cori O’Lan’s visualizations, all graphic elements are derived directly from the acoustic material, i.e. the sound of the music. For this purpose, the piano is picked up with microphones and these signals are then transformed by the computer into a multitude of information about frequency, pitch, volume, dynamics, etc… This information, in turn, is used to control the graphics computer, create graphical elements or modify them in many ways. Since these processes take place in real time, there is a direct and expressive connection between the music and visual interpretation. The visualization is actually not “created” by the computer but much more by the music itself – the computer is rather the instrument, the brush operated, played by the music.