John Cage Cage, in a Francis Bacon Box
2025
I conceived of this project while building a theremin emulation in Touchdesigner. It is not a theremin emulator anymore—instead, it is a piano playable by interactive hand gestures, which displays two forms of notation. Right and left is pitch increase and decrease; opening the hand adds more degrees to the scale, closing it removes them. On the right is regular staff notation, while on the left is ‘John-Cage style’.
Francis Bacon box comes, of course, from the painter. When I worked at Christie’s, I spent a great deal of time researching his work. One of the things that stuck with me was his penchant for bounding his subjects in his characteristic wireframe boxes. To him it was just a visual concentration, but to us (based on his subject matter, at least), it amplifies the claustrophobia. A bit of a Baconesque twist on Hamlet’s ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”
The hand interaction is powered by Torin Blankensmith’s Mediapipe plug-in for Touchdesigner. In its present functionality, only the ability to shift between C-major and -minor are available, as well as a few melodies that autoplay when a specific hand gesture is made. However, I programmed it to be very easily scalable.
When making electronic music, or music electronically, it feels disingenuous to rely wholly on the music staff, as so much of the process and final product depend on circuitry and algorithmic harmonies in ways that the staff cannot adequately capture. This ‘Cage-style’ scoring is the result of taking the individual sine waves produced by each note, collating them along a 1 x 10 pixel output, and then finally converting them into their own visual audio ‘wave’. From that, I track motion of that wave, superimpose music notes, and connect them via lines according to their apparent relation to one another.
Some images from the network below. A screengrab from the development of the Cage notation, my filtering of MIDI values to get perfectly accurate scale data, and the addition of the chords.
