About

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

At the centre 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

Early experiments in music responsiveness were encouraged by flautist Carla Rees, whose work helped push the system beyond a purely technical curiosity and into something that could support an ongoing practice.

The project then developed 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.

Performances

The work has now been presented in two performances at The MAC, Belfast on 13 April 2026, marking an important step in the project’s development from studio-based experimentation into public performance.

The programme combined a live presentation of MarkSynth’s computational drawing with physical drawing in response to music by artist Heidi Nguyen.

Further performances are now in development, as the project continues to grow through new collaborators, contexts, and live iterations.

For rehearsal notes leading up to the MAC performances, see the update: Heading to The MAC, Belfast.