About

Performance Fingerprints is an ongoing collaborative project exploring drawing as a responsive system shaped by live sound and performance.

At the center of the work is a custom-built computational drawing system that responds in real time to acoustic instruments. Rather than treating audio as a simple control signal, it is tuned to register nuance (intensity, articulation, rhythm, and texture) so that marks emerge through interaction and improvisation.

Origins

The project began through collaboration between Steve Meyfroidt and violinist and performer Ioana Petcu-Colan. Early sessions were structured as experiments: trying different musical approaches, watching how they changed the drawing, and then letting the constraints of the system feed back into performance choices.

The drawings are best understood as traces of exchange over time — not representations of sound, but records of interaction.

MarkSynth

A major strand of the practice is MarkSynth: a computational drawing instrument developed through sustained collaboration with musicians and a choreographer. The system is designed for shared agency in performance, where control can shift between the performer(s), the operator, and the semi-autonomous behavior of the software.

The broader umbrella name Performance Fingerprints points to human specificity in live performance: timing, touch, hesitation, emphasis, space, and collaboration. “Fingerprint” here is not biometric — it’s situational: the residue of decisions made together under time pressure.

What it is (and isn’t)

• It’s a live, collaborative drawing practice where computation acts as an improvisational partner.
• It isn’t a music visualizer, a fully autonomous generative artwork, or a repeatable screen-based animation.

Context

Development so far has taken place across different sites including Digital Arts Studios (Belfast) and Cork School of Music, and has involved an expanding group of collaborators.