Drawing to Music

Something I've wanted to do for quite a while is improvise a drawing to music. Actually, this isn't hard to organise, since you just have to switch on a stereo and start drawing. But it's a different thing if you are doing it with a live musician. The idea is that both the musician and the artist draw inspiration from each other and form a proper improvisational group in different media.

I was drawing in ink with the dropper from the top of the ink bottle on white paper. Ergina was using a keyboard set to 'electric piano sound'. For the first occasion, we didn't want to do anything elaborate, so unfortunately the sound isn't recorded. Next time, we hope to use the house projector (currently being mainly used for Streetfighter IV) so that E. can see what I am drawing, rather than just my movements. Then we can record the music and drawing simultaneously and I can post it up here.

These are the pictures from the first session:

Picture 1: Ergina made quite random, atonal sounds on the keyboard. Occasionally these would cluster into themes, like light, short trills, or slower, darker riffs. I ended up matching the force of my strokes to the sounds I was hearing. The theme of the picture just came out of nowhere, as marks started coming together.

Picture 2: I asked Ergina to do something different, and play with chords (the first piece had been entirely single notes. This resulted in more of a 'mood' piece, with one particular ambience, which I would describe as quite melancholy, hence the rain and sad theme of the picture. There were no individual sounds to match my pen strokes, so I was freer to draw at my own pace.