Blossom

Although we’ve never met in person, I’ve been collaborating for several years with percussionist Raina Liao, creating visuals for her performances based on her synesthesia.

This time, we worked on Blossom, a piece composed by Ancel Fitzgerald Neeley for snare drum and vocoder. It was a complex challenge for many reasons: an abstract 10-minute composition with a subtle biological narrative and — as always — the distance. I was between Italy and Santiago; Raina was in Texas. Nearly 8,000 km apart… and a couple of time zones in between.

To tackle the process, we divided the piece into 8 sections. I assigned a different "sound reactor" to each one, each inspired by microscopic scenes from biology that would gradually lead to blooming — in reference to the title of the piece.

Raina sent me a reference audio with the clicktrack she was using to rehearse — the same one she’d use in the final performance. That audio became the base to generate visuals that would be tightly synced and react in real time on stage.

The sound reactors were first created in black and white. Color was applied afterward, based on Raina’s personal synesthetic associations between musical notes and colors. We worked with massive RGB value tables mapped to precise timestamps, allowing us to build accurate gradients and assign color to each sound event.

Watch the full video here