Category: Videomusic

(2018-2020) video and electroacoustic music [32′ 09″]

Video: Ivan Penov

Premiered at Festival Signal to Noise, livestreaming, February 6^th 2021

Commissioned by La Stoppa di Elena Pantaleoni, Ancarano di Rivergaro (PC)

The work is the second part of the Trilogy of Temporality, a video-music project conceived by Roberto Doati.

The project is divided into three parts: “Il suono bianco” (The white sound), “Il suono rosso” (The red sound) and “Il suono verde” (The green sound). Each part is an audio-visual staging created by a video artist and a composer of electroacoustic music on three important Italian food realities: cheese, wine, vegetables.

• Why ‘staging’? Because the images and sounds of the territory, of the raw materials, of the processing of each food, become the characters of a narrative that is sometimes fantastic, sometimes pure tale.
• Time or temporality? The cheese is produced in one day, every day of the year and is consumed both quickly and over a long period. The wine is produced in months but only once a year and is consumed almost exclusively over a long period. The vegetables are produced in different seasons, but are distributed throughout the year and are consumed almost exclusively in a short time. However, the project also alludes to the theme of temporality, a condition of what is opposed to what is eternal, but not devoid of a spirituality peculiar to Italian culture.

Food and music both imply the ability to act and produce based on a particular set of rules and cognitive experiences. We start from basic materials (grapes – sounds) to make, through countless transformation techniques, complex materials (olfactory/gustatory structures – sounds) which, aggregated, will give life to the final work (wine – music).

The audio and video footage was distributed over time according to the rhythms and phases of static and extreme dynamism typical of wine production. If the musical part follows a linear path (from the pruning of the vineyard to the cellar), the visual part breaks the linearity by building a narrative of its own. The visual material of the different stages during the creation of the wine is broken down and recreated later by exchanging elements: making hypnotic what is violent and finding a very animated dynamism in apparently calm situations. The same happens in the continuous exchange between the colours and tones of the grapes, the earth and the mechanical processes.

The result is a hallucination of what one goes through during the processing of the grapes, as if it were a stream of sensory consciousness. The visual composition thus adheres to the chaotic nature of the dynamic processes of wine production due to weather and biological conditions that cannot be completely controlled by humans. In a very intimate audio-visual journey, these elements are questioned without distorting the material but to make visible moments that are usually invisible/unheard and at the same time ambiguous.

Roberto Doati, Ivan Penov

(2015) video and electroacoustic music [18’ 10″]

Video: Maurizio Goina

Commissioned by Caseificio Di Nucci 1662, Agnone

The work is the first part of the Trilogy of temporality, a video-music project conceived by Roberto Doati.

The project is divided into three parts: “Il suono bianco” (The white sound), “Il suono rosso” (The red sound) and “Il suono verde” (The green sound). Each part is an audio-visual staging created by a video artist and a composer of electroacoustic music on three important Italian food realities: cheese, wine, vegetables.

• Why ‘staging’? Because the images and sounds of the territory, of the raw materials, of the processing of each food, become the characters of a narrative that is sometimes fantastic, sometimes pure tale.
• Time or temporality? The cheese is produced in one day, every day of the year and is consumed both quickly and over a long period. The wine is produced in months but only once a year and is consumed almost exclusively over a long period. The vegetables are produced in different seasons, but are distributed throughout the year and are consumed almost exclusively in a short time. However, the project also alludes to the theme of temporality, a condition of what is opposed to what is eternal, but not devoid of a spirituality peculiar to Italian culture.

Culinary art and musical art have many similarities: there is a tradition made up of recipes (for music: harmony, counterpoint, classical forms), we start from basic materials (sounds) to make them, through countless transformation techniques, complex materials (the sound structures) that aggregate will give life to the final work.Il suono bianco comes from the meeting with a true Master Craftsman: Franco Di Nucci. Every day, for a whole week, we collected images and sounds of the processing in his dairy. Our audiovisual story therefore takes place from the pastures to the arrival of milk, from buttermilk to ricotta, the vapors, the many and different gestures that in the preparation of cheese shape the candid spun dough as if it were material for sculptures, the process of conservation and control aging, tasting. Formally it is divided into five episodes, characterized by an alternation of stillness and rhythm, of external and internal spaces.

(2013) video and electroacoustic music [11’ 08″]

Video: Paolo Pachini

Chef: Luigi Zanco

Premiered at “La Storia in piazza- I tempi del cibo”, Torre Grimaldina, April 12th 2014

Seppie senz’osso is the 5^th episode from the audiovisual project Titolo segreto per quadrati, tromba fitta, frutti cavi (Secret title for squares, dense trumpet, hollow fruits),  born from the collaboration with the chef Gigi Zanco.

Why cooking? Because Culinary Art and Music have much in common: there is a tradition of recipes (for music: harmony, counterpoint, classical forms) and both start from common basic materials (sounds) to make them, through countless techniques transformation, complex materials (sound structures) that shaped in a form will create the final work. But the Culinary Art also proceeds for variations of shapes, colors, prime matters that pass from one state to another; and then there are the gestures, sometimes delicate, sometimes bloody.

To unravel these sound and visual relationships (and hopefully suggest those linked to the touch and taste), a real movie set was set up where the cook is headed by a director (Paolo Pachini) who through an interpretation, at times surreal, enhances the cultural characteristics of the preparation of various dishes.

Synopsis

The traditional course of the Venice lagoon revisited with ‘Middle Age/Japanese’ imaginary lens. Eyes and ears are driven from the unavoidable cruelty to the clean cutting. Through washing and quick cooking, we arrive to the final geometric arrangement, where all the parts of the sea monsters, together with their worthy companions – bread with the squid’s black ink, white polenta and red pomegranate – find the dignity of magic symbols, fixing in order our appetites. The accompanying music is made by: pomegranate harmonic songs – without words -, smokes that shout at their loudest, warbles of Danish knifes.

Roberto Doati, Paolo Pachini

(2010) video and electroacoustic music [21’50”]

Premiered at Sala Accademia, Conservatorio di musica “Santa Cecilia”, Roma, October 22nd 2013

In this work the link between video and music is based on the idea of contrast. There are 1 Tema and 4 Variations and the tension and the rigidity of the sounds and structures, different in each of the five parts, produce a different perception of the sensuousness, softness and fluidity of the images: falling silk fabrics.

The video editing follows, with a certain degree of freedom, the pitch series of Anton Webern Variations op. 30. By chance I brought 12 fabrics of different colours, but it was enough for me to choose the comfortable guide of musical serialism.

Another important link between video and music is represented here by the software environment I have used. The EyesWeb program tracks several parameters from the video, such as hue, saturation, brightness, center of gravity, etc., and map them to Csound patch for signal processing in real-time. Only the Tema is composed in a traditional way, i.e. editing sounds on the video track according pure musical inspiration.

The Violin you hear is Marco Rogliano (Tema), the Ropes (Variazione 1) are the barges of Berio’s square in the harbour of Genova as recorded by Alessandro Quaranta who I want to thank, the Voice (Variazione 2) is Giorgio Bertan, the Stones and Cloth (Variazione 3 and 4) is me.

In the XV Century Genova, Firenze and Venezia were the three places for silk production. I am bound to them by a deep sense of belonging.

(2009) video and live electronics [7’ 02”]

Premiered at Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti”, Riva del Garda, November 21st 2010

Commissioned by Conservatorio di musica “F.A.Bonporti” di Trento, sede di Riva del Garda

The macrocosm staircase corresponds to the different cognitive faculties: sense, imagination, reason,  discernment, understanding, word. The staircase can’t go any further because…

This work was commissioned by “F.A. Bonporti” Music Conservatory in Trento (Riva del Garda department) in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, in honour of the 400^th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first use of the telescope for astronomical observation.

Considering several aspects of our times I think that we are living in an era similar to the Middle Age, so far from the scientific revolutions of XVII Century. Therefore I have realized in sounds and images the Aristotle and Tolomeo’s point of view, where the Earth is the centre of the Universe.

That is why:

• flat and stiff images alternate on the screen with curved and flexible surfaces;
• I am using almost entirely blue color (blue stars are the closest to Earth);
• I am using as sound materials only small excerpts from instrumental (i.e. acoustic) music of the XX Century. It is very usual to make a connection in our mind between electronic sounds and sounds coming from the outer space. For me the sounds in this work represent what one can hear when orbits the Earth.

The music I am playing with all these music is an homage to John Cage, who wrote the closest music to a starry sky. All the sounds are performed in real time changing its pitch and duration according a random numbers generator. The performer is on charge of the musical structure according her/his own “taste”: from very sparse to very dense. Thus there are ideally infinite versions of La scala non procede oltre, or better still as many stars there are in the sky or even better as many stars the human being can discover in the Universe.

My thanks to Luciano Berio, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dumitru Fărcaş, Morton Feldman, Charlie Haden, German Kuular, Bruno Maderna, Olivier Messiaen, Charles Mingus, Harry Partch, Andrei Popa, Steve Reich, Alexander Salchak, Giacinto Scelsi, Robert Schumann, Salvatore Sciarrino, Fernando Sor, Edgar Varése, Lui Pui-Yuen, Iannis Xenakis, wishing that copying the Masters out within our hermitages will help to prepare a New Renaissance.

(2008-2009) video and live electronics

“Il transito ostile della luna” [5’ 17”]

Premiered at Riva del Garda, May 3rd 2008

Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati

“Potrete incappare in un contrattempo” [5’17”]

Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010

Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati

“Le stelle suggeriscono nuove opportunità” [5’ 18”]

Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010

Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati

“Vivrete una settimana all’insegna della stabilità” [6’]

Premiered at : Sala Tartini del Conservatorio “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, November 24th 2010

Video & live electronics: Roberto Doati

The videomusic series Sindrome scamosciata is inspired by IPCRESS, my very first encounter with electronic music in 1965. It is a film directed by Sidney Furie, based on a spy novel by Len Deighton, starring Michael Caine who works for some secret agency of the government. IPCRESS stands for “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS”.

Both the visual and sound materials come from a scene where Caine, kidnapped by the Soviet with the help of a British betrayer, is subjected to brainwashing. He is forced to listen to some electronic music and is hurt by a repeated sequence of synthetic images in a sort of guided imagery.

All of my video start with a sequence recalling the IPCRESS one, then becoming a study on image persistence. I realized these images superimposing a holed black cardboard to the screen of my turned-on TV. Shooting in the dark with a very slow shutter and moving quickly the video camera gives rise to luminous traces. An out of context subliminal image appears periodically.

The music is performed and “improvised” on stage within a Csound + Max/MSP environment patch with 21 control parameters to modify the 30 seconds original soundtrack of the brainwashing scene, the base algorithm being a Phase Vocoder analysis-synthesis with 100 oscillators.

In The IPCRESS File book each chapter is headed with a quote from a horoscope, so the title of each piece of my series is extracted from my stars for the day I realize the piece: : “Il transito ostile della luna”, “Potrete incappare in un contrattempo”, “Le stelle suggeriscono nuove opportunità”, “Vivrete una settimana all’insegna della stabilità”.

Thanks to Matteo Ricchetti who was able to transform a remedy to my inexperience with video technology in an improving meaning in Il transito ostile della luna.