Da Capo

Da Capo is a single-channel generative film (2min 25s) in which a real-time system negotiates creative control between a human pianist and a machine trained on a single piece of music. The machine is fitted to a recording of Beethoven and given the capacity to insist upon it: while the performer plays the known tune, the system is silent, but when he departs into an improvisation of his own, the system reasserts the trained piece, more loudly, until his playing is drawn back to it. He escapes only by ceasing to make music at all, a sustained percussive refusal that the system cannot parse as a piece and does not survive. Every audio and visual parameter of the film, including the animation of a wooden marionette pianist, is driven frame by frame by the internal telemetry of the working system. The piece treats agency as a quantity that moves, measurably, between a performer and a model, and asks what remains of a performance once it has been reclaimed.