2018

Pianola Tengo was the first in a series of works which explores the generation of music through the pianola. This antique piano adaptation uses mechanical means to replay an earlier performance. Key to this is the pianola roll which holds the encoded performance as a roll of fine perforated paper. While the traditional process is based on a recorded piano performance, Tengo22 has a literary source which is a page from the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The careful grading of the text to match the requirements of the pianola mechanism and the logical mapping of specific letters within the text, produced a performance which begins to approach the altered reality evident in the novel.

Materials: Pianola roll made from printed text. small speakers, ipad