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Juraj Kojs
Give me a beautiful color (2003)
for voice, bowed guitar, and percussive piano
Give Me a Beautiful Color is an installation. In this piece, a mechanism connecting the visual and aural in a similar manner they are related within a language was developed. The graphics display an omni directionally interpretable source in the same manner the instruments capacitate rich multidimensional sonic data. Reference towards the ancient iconographic languages of this project is undeniable. Its musical fluency and immediacy is however rather extended.
The three performers (the vocalist, bass guitarist, and piano-percussionist)
respond to a real-time graphic organism. The recognition path starts with the
eye of a digital camera absorbing its environment (i.e. a hall with the people).
This signal is analyzed in real-time by a computer. The color components of
red, green, and blue are separated from the complex color input depending on
their strong and weak presence within the image. A Jitter patch was used to
accomplish this task. Using a simple graphic system designed in Jitter, the
presence and intensity of the individual colors are displayed either in separate
window areas or mixed together. The performers as well as the audience view
the projected graphic windows. The performers instantly map the visual parameters
of shape, movement and presence of a color to the sound parameters of pitch,
loudness and timbre. This process is continuously re-cycled as the audience,
upon the aural stimulus, moves and, thus, provides fresh screening material
for the digital camera. In this sense, the audience essentially fully controls
the score and consequently the performers.
Click to enlarge the examples of individual color tracing and resynthesis:
The primary compositional technique utilized in this piece is rotation. Through
the combinatorial rotation, specific music parameters were assigned to specific
colors. Each player is assigned to read one of the primary colors (red, green,
and blue) and its neighbors within the color wheel. The performers map graphic
elements of movement, presence and brightness to different combinations of loudness,
pitch, and timbre. Rotation is present also within the performance organization:
color graphics alternate on the screen, and the players as well as the audience
in the performance space. In the individual parts, entire spectra of instruments'
pitch, loudness, and timbral ranges are covered. For example, the vocal part
is designed to map all the possible phonemes as they are created in the oral
cavity and by vocal apparatus. These are recalled upon recognition of a corresponding
visual event.
Click to view the vocal score:
The players alternate between their performance locations as well as their instruments. They keep mapping the graphics according their original instructions (e.g. a player mapping red continues reading this color as indicated in his/her score whether vocalizing, playing inside the piano, or bowing the bass guitar); yet depending on the screen position of their corresponding color they change the location and instrument.
INSTRUMENTATION
1 voice performing on bowed bass guitar and inside the piano
1 bowed bass guitar performing inside the piano and vocalizing
1 inside-the-piano percussion bowed bass guitar and vocalizing
1 Apple computer operating MAX/MSP and JITTER (Power Mac with OS 9.2 or higher)
1 Digital Camera and its operator
1 VGA Projector with a projection screen
Duration: ca. 8 minutes
Give Me a Beautiful Color was completed at Virginia Center for Computer Music
in spring 2003.
*The pictures at the top of the page come from the performance of the piece at the Fringe Festival in October 2003.