Dan Tepfer's Natural Machines Ep. 1: All The Things You Are / Canon at the Octave
DAN TEPFER

Online Video

Jazz music community with review and forums

In which I improvise over the chord progression to All The Things You Are and the piano responds with a canon at the octave.
Full album on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzNnspxG1f5Bks6R8ckCzDSEn__psaO8

All the music in this film was improvised as it was recorded, in a single take. The notes played by the computer were generated in response in real-time. Nothing was pre-recorded or pre-planned except the rules that the computer would follow to respond.

All The Things You Are is a song by Jerome Kern. Red shapes are notes that are non-diatonic to the home key of Ab Major.
__________________________________________

Natural Machines is a project where I explore the intersection, in music, between natural and mechanical processes. I improvise at the piano, and programs I’ve written on my computer interact with me in real-time as I’m playing, both musically and visually.

I'm playing on the Yamaha Disklavier. It's an acoustic piano with extra abilities: when I play, it sends data to my computer, and when my computer sends it data, it plays by moving the keys on its own. The sound the computer makes, through the piano, is exactly the same sound that I make myself.

In Natural Machines, instead of composing a piece, I decide the way a piece works. I program simple rules for the computer to follow when responding to what I play. Since I’m improvising, I’m always listening to what the computer is playing and responding to it as well. So the rules end up affecting me, too.

The visualizations I’ve made are intended to reveal the underlying musical structure of each piece. They’re generated in real-time as I play. Everything on the screen is a direct representation of some aspect of the music: pitch, dynamics, rhythm, harmony.

I’ve programmed the musical algorithms in SuperCollider, and the visuals in Processing.

Thanks to Yamaha for letting me film and record in their artist space in New York, on the DCFX Enspire piano.

And thank you for watching.

--Dan
__________________________________________

Filmed & recorded by Dan Tepfer at Yamaha Artist Salon New York
Musical algorithms programmed in SuperCollider by Dan Tepfer
Music visualizations programmed in Processing by Dan Tepfer
Video edit by Dan Tepfer
Disklavier ENSPIRE CFX piano by Yamaha
Gaffer: Garrett Doermann