Murmuration is a piano-driven audiovisual system I created for WINTERCIRCUS Ghent, on view to the public from October 2024 through January 2025 with multiple live performances. It ran on a self-playing grand piano. When a pianist played, the system analyzed the performance in real time and generated abstract visuals from it. When no one was playing, the piano performed the system’s own minimal, ambient compositions.
The generative music is composed as modules of MIDI clips in Ableton Live. Each clip’s follow behavior lets it loop back or move forward, so the structure is randomized on every pass, and TouchDesigner launches a new module when the current one ends. On the analysis side, the system tracks how many notes fall in a time window, how long they are and how hard they’re played, and reduces that to a single measure of activity over time. Staccato passages are separated out to trigger faster-moving visuals.
Demo featuring the direct output from the system:
Video from a performance in the space (no audio):
The visuals combine two generative systems. A custom flocking simulation, descended from Craig Reynolds’ 1986 “Boids,” moves 3D agents that align with their neighbors and match speed and orientation like a flock of birds, with different aspects of the playing steering each flock. A particle and attractor system gives each individual note its own visual presence. Together they aim for a painterly quality drawn from organic, emergent motion.
Color and other visual parameters come from Sentisonics, a harmony analysis tool being developed by jazz pianist Dennis Hamm, which assigns emotional weights to harmonic relationships. Mapping those weights to palettes ties the visuals to models of how we perceive music and Western harmony.