About

“Pianographique – Piano Music x Digital Images” is a series of collaborations of Cori O’Lan with pianists Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies.

The visualisations are not videos that are more or less synchronous to the music and it is also not the musicians playing to prefabricated material, they are jointly created together in the moment of the performance. And as the musical interpretation changes from performance to performance, so it  happens with the visualization.

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 pianos are 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 the 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.

contact@cori-olan.art

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About Cori O’Lan:

Cori O’Lan works at the crossroads of art and technology since the late 1980ies. Recently he has been focusing on realtime-computer-visualisation of orchestra and piano music. In a long term collaboration with the Ars Electronica Futurelab, the pianist Maki Namekawa and the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, he has been developing a unique style of „accompanying visualisations“ In this projects he works with elaborated realtime analysis of various sonic parameters of the music to be visually interpreted.

The aim is always to go beyond a direct, “mechanical” translation of sound-data into visual-data but to create kind of living, organic entities which have already their own behavior – derived from the general characteristics of a music piece – and on top of this listens to the music and responds in realtime to it.

These visual-concert-projects have been presented in New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi and at Ars Electronica Linz.