Another of these weird little things I’ve been making lately:

Dōjō Phase

An audio/video process composition. The composition consists of three parts playing repetitive patterns, which differ slightly in length. As the parts move through the patterns, they become further & further out of sync, until the middle of the piece where they switch and start moving back towards synchrony.

The same rules applied to the musical composition are then applied to the video, with each of the three panels representing one of the piano parts, and changing to a new scene when the corresponding part moves to a new musical pattern.

The visuals are generated from about 15 seconds of footage… I like to keep it economical. It’s taken from a flashback moment from the Japanese film Ame Agaru.

For the super nerdy among us, the left part is in 4/4 for the first half, 7/8 in the second half. The center part is in 15/16 the whole time, and the right part is in 7/8 for the first half and 4/4 in the second half. The intro and outro consist of all of the patterns from the piece played through without repeating.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to call this an experiment in isorhythm, rather than phasing… but there is a definitely a kind of phase going on that gives life and unpredictability to the piece.