The piano in interactive musical processes: new gestures and new dialogues

Abstract

The current Project aims at researching possibilities and demands which are raised from the confrontation between the contemporary pianists with updated musical practice, more precisely the ones linked to electroacoustic mixed music, which gathers traditional music instruments with electronic resources, and the growing real-time interaction possibility. Its development will depart from theoretical and conceptual studies about aspects such as interactive music processes, music and mediation technology, musical gesture, performativity arts, as well as the setting-up and analyses of the sound potentiality and quality, and also the idiomatic and gestural analysis of the contemporary piano. Then, compositional and improvisatory resources will be investigated, integrating the piano and its potentialities to technological resources and predicting development of patches and applications, as well as the use of sensors and gesture control interfaces, and real time sound processing, possible to be manipulated by the musician. From the generated result at this stage (composition, patches, processes and improvisatory resources), strategies for the performance preparation will be investigated, which embrace not only the idiomatic complexity of contemporary music, but also the new attributions from the instrument professional, against the challenge of playing an instrument and at the same time communicate with the sound processes throughout appropriate interfaces.Thus, the following areas are approached in this project: musical performance, musical improvisation and sinology. The presented results will be disseminated through publications in journals, participations in scientific meetings, artistic performances, audiovisual records (DVD) and workshops.