2023
4-channel videos with 6 channels of audio (composition for viola, crotales, woodblock, self-playing piano, e-bows on piano strings, electronic sounds, water fountain, painted screens, and custom software); duration variable, a full cycle averages at 2 hours 10 mins
(Note: the video preview shows one instance of a playback for 30 minutes. The playback is randomized by a program, and the average duration of one full cycle is 2 hours 10 mins.)
Computer programming, composition, video and sound editing
Samson Young
Viola
William Lane
Camera
Leung Ho Sing
Leung Tin Chun Jimmy
Lau Chun Yuen
Audio
Chiui Ho Chi Brother
Samson Young
Lighting
Ho Yan Lam Coey
Ng Ka Wai Dikky
Kwan Ka Heng Jennifer
Tam Ho Fung Edwin
Production Management
Jones Lee
”The viewing of Variations of 96 chords in space does not require knowledge of how it was put together, but for those who are curious, I have described my process in the passages below. The system that underpinned the work is important insofar that it helped to sustain a process in this particular instance for longer than if I were to rely on intuition alone; but ultimately the experience - a sequencing of music and images that is sometimes ordered, sometimes (more often, actually) haphazard - is probably more important.
A. I started with a chart of 96 ‘color chords.’ There are 12 hues of color within the set. Each hue is associated with a key area. Lighter tints yielded chords with fewer varieties of intervals, and as the color tone gets darker the intervallic relationships within a chord become more varied and complex.
B. The work of composing involved the arrangement of notes and sounds, but also the choreography other elements, including the microphones that ‘listened’ to the sources of these sounds. We used four kinds of microphones in this work: (1) a shotgun microphone, which is the most directional and has the shortest capture range, which I think of as the equivalent of a ‘tight’ camera frame; (2) an omni-directional microphone, a kind of ‘mid-shot’; (3) binaural microphones that I was wearing over my ears, which is a kind of ‘POV image’ of the room that moves with me; (4) a XY stereo pair, which is placed at the front of the room. 1, 2 and 3 moved around the room to explore a variety of listening positions and range, while mic 4 was stationary and stayed with the front-of room camera.
C. Each color chord gave rise to a short composition of either 60 or 90 seconds. Each short composition was filmed twice in the same theater, each time with a different subset of compositional elements.
D. The playback program stitches the individual clips back together in different ways and shuffles their order of appearance. In half of the time, the program will trace a randomly selected array of color hue, moving from lighter tints to darker shades. Once it reaches the end it will jump to the beginning of another array, until all 12 hues / 96 colors are heard. In these array-trace sequences, we see and hear the complete set of elements of a single color chord composition. There is a fifty percent chance that an array-trace sequence will be interrupted by a color mixing event: the simultaneous playback of either four randomly selected shades of the same color hue, or two randomly selected complementary colors. In these moments, subsets from several compositions are brought together instead.”