Gestures of Nature is an informal concert of new music for violin, voice, live electronics & interactive visuals using MUGIC®, a motion sensing technology. We’ll begin with a demo by MUGIC creator Mari Kimura, followed by performances of four pieces of contemporary music that use interactive gesture to creatively embody the natural world – from bird calls to butterfly fractals; from atmospheric Rossby waves to New York Harbor tides. The artists will talk about their works and we’ll conclude with a Q&A! We welcome existing MUGIC users, musicians who’d like to learn more about motion sensing technology, and anyone looking to enjoy an afternoon of boundary-defying music during Governors Island Climate Week.
Program
abash the Little Bird (2024) by Raina Arnett/Glass Clouds Ensemble was created from Deep Listening exercises by Pauline Oliveros during an artist residency on Governors Island. Setting text from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope” is the thing with feathers, Arnett designed a structured improvisatory landscape from musical fragments inspired by the surroundings at Earth Matter NY’s Governors Island farm and compost site: its regenerative natural cycles, bird calls, and other sounds of nature. The musicians use gesture to trigger, develop, and modulate these fragments.
Rossby Waving (2017) by Mari Kimura, visuals by Liubo Borissov is inspired by the “Rossby Wave”, a natural atmospheric phenomenon relating to rotation of the planet. When the Rossby Wave ‘breaks’, it can cause extreme climate conditions including El Niño/La Niña. The piece consists of a ‘flexible ostinato’, a somewhat regular ‘wave’ of violin sound that’s processed and flows. The motion sensor MUGIC® detects and interprets the character of the bowing movements which affect ‘ostinato’ in its timbre and character. Some irregular and disruptive motive starts to affect the regular ostinato, sometimes mangling it. Eventually both the violin and ostinato flow freely, sometimes and sometimes not, affecting each other. Rossby Waving is dedicated to the memory of Jean-Claude Risset.
Voyage Apollonian (2011) by Mari Kimura, visuals by Ken Perlin. Mari Kimura, violin.
One day, I found a beautiful animation my friend Ken Perlin posted on his blog (http://blog.kenperlin.com) which I follow with regularity. Ken is an Oscar-winning computer graphics artist and professor at NYU, renowned for “Perlin Noise”, a technique widely used in computer graphics and motion pictures today. Ken designed this imaginative animation based on the fractal ideas called the “Apollonian Gasket.” This animation gave me an intuitive reaction that I wanted to make the music for it. His creation looked so musical that I could almost hear the sounds coming from it, which was a new experience for me. In this piece, I affect Ken’s animation using audio information from the violin, as well as my bowing motions using MUGIC®. Voyage Apollonian was commissioned by the American Festival of Microtonal Music, and premiered at their 30th anniversary concert in May, 2011.
Deriving Synchrony, Cycle II [reconfigured] (2025), music and visuals by Johnny Tomasiello.
This piece is a real-time generative and interactive audio and visual work whose primary purpose is to explore the reciprocal relationship between electrical activity in the brain and external stimuli that are generated and defined by those same physiological and physical events, through the use of a Brain-Computer Music Interface (BCMI). A gestural dimension has been introduced through the MUGIC® motion sensor as a channel for reciprocal physical data, governing the timbral and spatial articulations of the performance. Further linking this work to the natural world it inhabits, the scales and musical structure employed here are derived from NOAA tidal projections for New York Harbor, reflecting the tides surrounding Governors Island on the day of the performance, Saturday, September 27, 2025.
