IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC

Friday 22 December 2017, 20:00

black MIDI | Pianola pieces by Tom Johnson, Conlon Nancarrow and others | Sorting Algorithms

This event will be an evening about music that is humanly "impossible" to play and that exploits the limits of technology. The evening will focus on compositions that take in consideration the graphical aspect as much as the sound result.

It will feature real time performances of "black MIDI" pieces - a musical genre showing MIDI compositions with millions of notes and intricate visuals that test the processing powers of computers. The pieces will be rendered in real time, adding the real possibility of a system freeze or crash. Can a computer make musical content that exceeds possibilities of human beings?

We will also explore the possibilities of a Pianola, also known as a mechanical piano, by including several pieces played on an actual Pianola in W139.

Next to that the evening will also include visualization and "audibilization" of Sorting Algorithms, which are algorithms that put elements of a list in a certain order, crucial to any computer operation. The transposition of this process into a visual and audio context creates purely mathematical proto-compositions.