Music, Moving Images, Double Bass
Music, Moving Images, Double Bass
Portfolio
Printemps Permanent
Duration: 4 minutes
Year of composition: 2022
Instrumentation: Sampled double basses, sampled guitars, percussion, video
Role: Composer, performer, audio and video producer
3D visual effects by Claudio Cavallari
Printemps Permanent is an étude for sampled instruments, first released as a single in early 2022 and later included on my double album Ritournelles & Mosaïques (Cantaloupe Music, May 2022). The piece is one of the practical outcomes of my doctoral research at Princeton University, centered on creating a digital, portable, and almost utopian version of my instrument, the double bass.
For this project, I built a large repository of audiovisual samples using a wide range of techniques and an extreme “round-robin” approach, in which a single MIDI note can trigger many distinct samples. The composition was created using this digital double bass along with a custom arpeggiator, supplemented by video samplers for guitalele and percussive bass elements. All materials were generated in real time, recorded, and placed within a 3D environment using a particle system.
French journalist Mélanie Bauer described Printemps Permanent as “beautiful, a massage for the brain” on France Inter in May 2022.
USA
Duration: 17 minutes
Year of composition: 2019
Instrumentation: Player piano, Max patch, and video
Role: Composer, programmer, video producer
Mixing and mastering by Joe Branciforte
USA is a generative work for player piano and video built from a network of 63 digital metronomes, each offset by one millisecond. Every pulse triggers both a fragment of the American flag (a star or a stripe) and a corresponding piano note. The stars generate a largely chromatic line, while the stripes articulate an A-minor triad. The piece opens in perfect synchronization, drifts gradually out of phase, and closes when the metronomes realign. At the midpoint, the system’s point of symmetry, both sound and image begin to break down through layered video effects and a narrowing melodic range—a gradual decay intended as a reflection on the state of the United States and a commentary on the political climate during the 2019 presidency.
TRAINS
Duration: 3 minutes
Year of composition: 2022
Instrumentation: video samples of trains, multitracked double basses, and audiovisual effects
Role: Composer, performer, audio and video producer
Mastering by Jessica Thompson
Trains is composed entirely from sampled train recordings sourced from extensive YouTube compilations, with material ranging from North America to India. The piece highlights the expressive qualities of train horns—their monophonic calls, unexpected polyphonies, and subtle shifts—treating them as musical voices rather than environmental sounds. The bass parts shadow the trajectories of the trains, creating a low-frequency counterpoint that anchors the texture. Trains is also a demonstration of the audiovisual system I developed in Max for Live and Ableton Live, illustrating how environmental recordings can be transformed into structured musical and visual forms.
Game
Duration: 2 minutes
Year of composition: 2017
Instrumentation: cello, electronics, video
Role: Composer, visual production
Cello: Nick Photinos
Producer: Doug Perkins
Engineer/Mixing/Post-Mastering: Patrick Burns
Mastering: Joel Gordon
Game is the first movement of a multimovement work titled Petits Artéfacts for solo cello, electronics, and video. Composed in 2017 for cellist Nick Photinos, the piece was released later that year on the album Petits Artéfacts on New Amsterdam Records. This opening movement sonifies an early game of Pong by mapping the motion of the ball to pitches on the cello, turning a simple digital interaction into a playful musical gesture.
20%
Duration: 1 minutes
Year of composition: 2023
Instrumentation: Double bass, percussion, voices, and video sample
Role: Composer, video and audio production
Mastering: Jessica Thompson
20% transcribes the inflections of a YouTuber’s spoken voice into musical notes and patterns. The source video features a creator explaining how to make music “20 percent more interesting” by using five chord tricks. The piece is not meant to make fun of the speaker. Instead, it highlights the subjective nature of musical value and the gap between prescriptive advice and individual creative expression.
Celebrities 1
Duration: 10 minutes
Year of composition: 2024
Instrumentation: Videos of popular singers from the West, organ, double bass, guitars, voices
Role: Composer, performer, audio and video production
Celebrities 1 is part of a larger series of portrait-mode videos released between 2023 and 2025 under the title Decorum Impeccable.
This piece draws on videos returned by a Google search for “most famous songs of all time,” using short excerpts as source material for a three-voice, multiphonic, polytonal audiovisual sampler.