Forme Immateriali (Immaterial Forms)

Roma, inaugurazione venerdì 6 febbraio 2015 - ore 17:30. 
Opera Musicale Adattiva di Michelangelo Lupone

Fontane della Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna di Roma

Concept
A drum stick sketches vanishing shapes in the water, leaving wakes and visual and sound fleeting profiles. Public gestures produce these sounds from the water, thanks to the immersion of the tip of a drum stick. The continuous mutation of shapes, of speed and positions, modify the timbre, the rhythm, the dynamic of the musical texture of characters that develops itself with unlimited variations during the time. Music, intense or quiet, assumes immaterial forms that make water vibrate with slightly wavelets that follow and integrate themselves with the public gesture.

Project, Music and Technologies
Forme Immateriali (Immaterial Forms) is a site-specific adaptive music sound work created by the composer Michelangelo Lupone and conceived to be completely integrated with the two fountains of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art), of Rome, regarding both the architectural structure and the sound materials. Music is generated starting from the sounds produced by the water jets that flow into the two tanks.

The incessant movements of the water in the two fountains produce sounds that are captured and modified by an advanced sensor and actuator system technologies,, to create different levels of musical transformation. The sound of the water, after being captured is analyzed by a computer that extract short fragments (grains) to recreate new sequences with different pitches, rhythms and timbres.
The realized sequences are organized in a polyphonic score and spread in water through special sound lens located in the two tanks. The music texture obtained in this way creates both a dialogue between the two tanks and games of “foreground” and “background” in the courtyard.
Public can immerse in the water the tip of a perceptible drum stick - that is available in the edge of every tank - and moving it, public can generate music forms and sound space trajectories.
This work was commissioned by Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, and realized by Centro Ricerche Musicali – CRM and is the first music work to be in a permanent collection of the museum.