WAVEGUIDE MODEL I
FILMMAKER
MEDIA ARTIST
Hailed by Chamber Music magazine for “pioneering achievements of the highest order,” the PRISM Quartet partners with Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts & Design in Philadelphia and 3-Legged Dog in New York City to co-present Breath Beneath, a pilot project that explores the intersection of music, interactive technology, and durational visual art. The Philadelphia program is presented under the umbrella of the Fringe Festival.
Breath Beneath is the first phase—and first public presentation—of a multi-year “Discovery” initiative, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Reaching across disciplines, the PRISM Quartet (saxophones) joins forces with two intrepid creative teams to investigate how saxophonists’ movements and sounds can be used to generate images—and how those images shape musical interpretation.
Waveguide Model I by filmmaker Mark DeChiazza and composer Dan Trueman (world premiere)
Dan Trueman—composer, fiddler, electronic musician, and co-founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra—composes and programs an interactive musical work titled Waveguide Model I. Trueman collaborates with filmmaker Mark DeChiazza to generate (in DeChiazza’s words) “a responsive system of projected imagery that functions in a manner analogous to breath.” DeChiazza explains: “I want to explore a territory outside commonly practiced modes of interactivity between sound and visual media that map music’s pitch or volume to determine the density, speed, and/or rhythm of visual events. To look for an apparent cause and effect logic that is not: louder or higher equals more or bigger.”
Trueman notes that “performance technologies are most compelling when there is an element of feedback between performers and technology, each influencing the other, making the technologies crucial to how the music is performed and experienced by the players, giving them real and meaningful agency.” Trueman envisions Waveguide Model I as a piece in which “sound and video work at cross-purposes, moving ideas about breath and time beyond body and machine.” PRISM performs Trueman’s commission within “a real-time interactive system that could expressively shape and animate a breathing visual world,” created jointly by Trueman and DeChiazza.
Waveguide Model I was performed on a joint program titled Breath Beneath, September 14th, 2017 at Drexel University's URBN Center, in Philadelphia and September 15th 2017 at 3-Legged Dog in New York City.
