Syna[A]: CLAVIER À LUMIÈRES 

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CLAVIER À LUMIÈRES was a performance project developed for a special musical event exploring the theme of synaesthesia in music. The event was held at MONA on 3-4 November, 2012.

I was commissioned by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra to present a way of visualising synaesthetic experience. Working with two colleagues, Rodney Berry and Chris Henderson, we constructed a system that captured the biometric performance data (EEG, EMG, ECG etc.) of a musician (Andrew Legg, pianist) and visualised this interactively on a large screen for the audience.

The visualisation was programmed and manipulated in realtime by Rodney Berry, using Touch Designer, drawing on various sensors attached to the musician and his instrument. The visualisation was fed back as a small-screen score to the musician (himself a synaesthete) as a kind of visual prompt for improvisation.

"In this work Syn[a] members Peter Morse and Rodney Berry join with musician Andrew Legg and medical researcher Chris Henderson for a sonic and visual performance inspired by Scriabin’s 1915 clavier à lumières colour organ instrument. Legg, too, has experienced synaesthesia, and as such creates correspondences between colour, sound and text. As he plays, data drawn from his brain and body via medical instruments is mixed with audio, video and musical data from his keyboard, and then transformed and projected as 3D shapes and colour. He uses the evolving images as a graphical score to guide his improvisation, thus closing the multi-sensory feedback loop that drives both the music and the images."

Performance Brochure