TRIPTYCH METAPHOR

The installation is divided in 4 elements. 1/The heart for the main building (The church), 2/The Enlightenment, 3/the Time, and 4/ the path connecting them all. My idea is to have the soundtrack synchronised to all the 4 elements. The soundtrack from the church (the heart) will impact the 2 other building via the path. If we put all soundtrack from all elements together they will match and interact.
For the heart beat we will focus on the idea of the pulse. The idea is to have the audience feel that pulse as the main power for the music and the animation. But we will use also different concepts going with the notion of pulse to offer variation and to enforce this feeling : speed variation, suspension, polyrhythmic pulses, divisions, out off phase pulses or synchronised pulses. We can also use a minimalistic single pulse or have a mass of cluster pulsating together. We can have this mass of beating hearts on their own but slowly synchronising into the same pulse until they hit all at once. Dissonant cluster in harmony but tuned in rhythm.

But we will need another layer for emotions using harmony this time. By combining pulses and harmony we will reach the idea of heart and it’s symbolic representation of love and passion. One of the best instrument to combine those is the piano of course it is a percussive polyphonic instrument. Programming on a computer different pulses, combining them in mathematical order, having acceleration on one layer and deceleration on anoter is one thing to imagine.. another thing is to play it. Either we will use a digital piano such as Pianoteq that will give us lots of variations of sounds to play with or we will have to find a Disklavier piano that is the one of the most famous mechanical piano today that will be triggered from a computer via midi.
The advantage of a virtual piano is that we can simulate a stage of multiple pianos each with it’s sound character and spotted in space as a different source that will enforce the idea of multiplicity. But the interest of a real piano is the process of sound recording where we could use contact microphones and mics inside the piano to find a sound close to “it’s heart”. I have been playing piano for decades for classical and experimental music and i know that having a microphone inside an acoustic piano (like contact microphones) allows soundscapes, echos, vibrations that resonates like huge cities or small detailed confined places.
But most likely we will combine both the acoustic piano and the digital one and finally we will resample all the audio material to process through effects such as the Morphagene from Make Noise, Magneto from Strymon and Rainmaker from intellijel to bring the original sounds to other dimensions with granular synthesis, complex delays and time shifting again with the intention of pulse and delay.