Partituira – Ligeti – {Excerpts} from Abstract Birds on Vimeo.
In the visual etude “Partitura-Ligeti,” dense constructions of abstract three-dimensional shapes fold in on one another, as if the lines of the score’s staff have become living muscular tissue, materializing into an architecture of musical form that quivers and bends. Shapes and particles flock like birds, taut and angular in the way that Ligeti’s intense string writing is.
It’s the latest audiovisual masterpiece from Abstract Birds and Quayola. And the technology needed to realize their vision is worth mentioning, too – DirectX 11 optimizations for the latest GPU routines recently added to vvvv make some of this possible. (We mentioned that milestone addition to the software vvvv earlier this week, the product of developer Mr. Vux.)
Full description — plus a fully-live realization, below:
Partitura-Ligeti is a collaboration between Abstract Birds + Quayola in the form of a live audiovisual
concert and installation based on Ligeti’s sonata for viola solo, performed by Odile Auboin of
Ensemble intercontemporain, Paris.
Inspired by the studies of artists such as Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, Partitura-Ligeti is inherently connected to music, generating and defining its own coherent visual language. Through the use of bespoke software, the sound of the viola is analysed and transformed into dynamic graphic scores.The six Ligeti pieces materialise into linear structures, translating the music and its complexities into abstract
geometries and forms.Ligeti had a far reaching influential palate from Renaissance to African music, literature, painting, architecture, science and mathematics, especially the fractal geometry of Benoît Mandelbrot and the writings of Douglas Hofstadter. The Sonata for Viola Solo, has been described as “perhaps the greatest paean yet written to a single string, in this case, the viola’s lowest string, “C” its most sensual asset. Commissioned by Arcadi for Nemo Festival, in collaboration with Ensemble Intercontemporain.
Abstract Birds / Quayola – Artists
Odile Auboin – Musician
Keri Elmsly – Producer
Adam Stark – Sound Analysis
Commissioned by Arcadi and Nemo Festival
In collaboration with Ensemble Intercontemporain
Music by György Ligeti
Developed in VVVV
with additional support from Julien Vuillet and Matt Swoboda
Abstract Birds is the duo Pedro Mari and Natan Sinigaglia. Previously, tracing the history of this work as it has evolved (and yes, I’m reusing the word architecture without recalling that I’d used it before, but… it still fits):
Impossible Architectures, in Real-Time Music Visualizations by Abstract Birds (vvvv)
Partitura: Spectacular Real-time Visualization of Music, and Thinking in 1D
http://vvvv.org/blog/partituira-ligeti-excerpts
http://vvvv.org/blog/partitura-ligeti-live-in-paris
Partitura – Ligeti {LIVE in Paris} from Abstract Birds on Vimeo.