art.description.project | duo pantoMorf is a Swedish electronic free impro duo and research project. Beginning in 2006, they have actively developed new ways of controlling electronic sound. Usually, they perform improvisation on two instances of the custom instrument "the expressure pad", which has become their main performance instrument. Based on a completely novel way of mapping gesture sound, it allows enormous timberal flexibility and expressive fingertip control at the same time. Both members have a background as musicians on traditional instruments, and this duo is an efforts to bring back musicianship into electronic music, that is, to be able to play electronic sounds as directly as acoustic instruments. The dogmas are: If we lift our hands, the instrument goes silent. There are no pre-programmed processes, and every change in sound corresponds to a change in the physical gesture from the musician.
The NEXT Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia, has been running for 15 years, and is a very important festival for experimental and electronic music in central Europe, with a tradition of inviting the most prominent improvisers and electronic musicians.
duo pantoMorf have performed numerous times in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK, USA, Canada and Slovakia, and they have performed with a number of prominent acoustic and electronic improvisers, such as the pioneering free improvisation ensemble AMM, Gino Robair, Nina de Heney, Lindha Kallerdal, Tim Perkis (of The Hub), Mats Gustafsson, and many others.
The novel mapping algorithms which forms the basis of the exPressure Pad instrument has been described in a couple of research papers (see below). Further publications are in the pipeline about the aesthetic implications and interaction patterns emerging from these instruments.
P. Dahlstedt, "Dynamic Mapping Strategies for Expressive Synthesis Performance and Improvisation" (S. Ystad, R. Kronland-Martinet, and K. Jensen (Eds.): CMMR 2008, Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music, LNCS), 2009. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-02518-1_16.
P. Dahlstedt och P. Nilsson, "Free Flight in Parameter Space: A Dynamic Mapping Strategy for Expressive Free Impro " (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 2008. | sv |
art.description.supportedBy | The composition, development and evaluation of the improvisation instruments takes place within our research projects Potential Music and Creative Performance, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The performance was invited by the NEXT Festival’s program group, and the festival covered all travel and accommodation costs. | sv |