Belfast: a first collaboration session

Performance Fingerprints started with a question: what would it mean to draw with a musical performance?

We didn’t want a music visualiser, with graphics pasted on top of sound. We wanted drawing that has to listen: marks that pick up the character of a particular performance, its timing, intensity, articulation, rhythm and texture.

Flautist Carla Rees encouraged some of the earliest experiments. Two of her pieces, Nightsong and Tregenna, were the first we kept coming back to as the system took shape.

Those early runs were messy, as they should be, but they showed the approach could work outside the studio. A gilded canvas made from a Nightsong drawing was later bought by a London collector. That told us the process could also make finished work that someone wanted to live with.

The drawing system responds to acoustic instruments as they play. It runs continuously, and we can take snapshots from it at any moment and remake them as physical work.

From live drawing to physical works

A snapshot still comes from a performance, but once it’s held still we can take our time with it and make it in different materials. So far that has meant:

• large colour triptychs made from photographic prints mounted onto panels,
• sequences of ink drawings on paper (sometimes cut and collaged into a left-to-right timeline),
• drypoint print series made from multiple states of the same plate, where some marks fade through repetition and others return when the plate is re-etched.

Two early pieces with silver leaf: a print and a detail.

Silver leaf keeps coming back. It catches the light, changes as you move, and doesn’t behave like ink or paint. It also literally reflects the viewer and the room around them, which is something we recognise from live music.

All of this was useful, but it was still mostly one-way: the music drove the drawing.

We wanted a loop, with the musicians responding to the drawing as it happens and the drawing responding back.

Belfast, February 2025

In February 2025 we held a first proper collaboration session in Belfast with violinist and performer Ioana Petcu-Colan and trombonist and collaborator Ross Lyness.

We worked at Digital Arts Studios (DAS). We kept the setup simple: a studio room, a large screen for the drawing, and time to try things without having to finish anything.

Ioana and Ross improvised while watching the drawing develop. We treated the whole thing as a conversation: play a little, watch a little, stop and talk, then try again.

A few things became clear quickly.

1) We needed a shared language

The system could respond, but it wasn’t always obvious what it was responding to.

That’s a problem for the collaboration as well as a technical one. If you’re going to improvise with something, you need some idea of what your actions mean to it.

So we talked about a shared language between the musicians and the drawing: a small set of musical actions the system can recognise reliably (density, register, pulse, intensity, articulation), each mapped to a change in the drawing you can read in the moment.

2) The loop was exciting, and chaotic

When the mapping isn’t clear enough, the loop can get busy fast: the drawing reacts strongly to moment-by-moment change, the performers react to the drawing, and the system reacts again.

In Belfast we felt that directly. The energy was good, but it was hard to sustain, because the drawing needed a better balance between responding and staying stable. We don’t want it calm all the time. It’s more like dynamics in music: intensity is useful, but so are space, contrast and holding a texture.

3) The drawing needed a bigger vocabulary

Professional musicians can reach for a huge range of techniques instantly. If the drawing is going to keep up as a partner, it needs a much wider range of marks.

The point is to give the system more ways to behave, so the drawing can change character when the music does.

Two early “fingerprints” from the Belfast session. Left: melodic violin playing. Right: extended techniques on trombone. Even with a limited range of marks at this stage, you can tell them apart.

What we brought home

We left Belfast with hours of audio recordings and filmed material.

The recordings document the session, and they’re also material for developing the system. In particular, we want to bring video back in, so the drawing can follow the performers’ gestures and movement as well as the sound.

Next steps

The next jobs are partly technical and partly artistic, and they’re closely linked:

• make it easier to see, in the moment, how the sound is changing the drawing,
• design drawing behaviours that can be responsive without becoming constantly agitated,
• expand the mark-making toolbox so the system can shift between different visual “modes”.

Longer term, we want a performance where the drawing and the music are both participants, each responding to the other.

Belfast was the first day it felt like we were getting there.