Music For Dance or Movement (2011) is a piece I originally developed not for dance but for modular audio/video synthesizer. The title suggested itself by the piece’s character of constant, elaborate motion, as well as by its audio source material: a recording of zills, the finger cymbals used in belly dancing and other Middle Eastern dance forms. I plan to create future versions of this piece in collaboration with one or more movement artists (possibly belly dancers).

I created the piece using a handmade analog synthesizer from Flower Electronics and a Eurorack-based modular hybrid audio/video synthesizer of my own design. I drew additional audio material from the aforementioned zills as well as a set of children’s toy handbells. The video source was a small security camera aimed out the window, down to a darkened street in Boston’s Fort Point. The audio and video processing was controlled entirely by control voltage, and the two synthesizers passed control signals between each other.

Here is a video clip of the first performance, where you can see a portion of the live video being generated.

Here is the complete audio, recorded directly from the board onto a Sony PCM-M10.