Moments of Inertia is a 12-part series of works for violin, electronics, and interactive video that look at emotional and social gesture through the metaphor of physics. The work was commissioned by Meet The Composer through their Commissioning Music / USA granting series, and was produced by New American Radio and Performing Arts with support from the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and several private foundations.

I wrote the piece for my dear friend and collaborator, violinist Todd Reynolds, whose particular performance practice revolves around the electro-acoustic technique of “live looping”, where he constructs an accompaniment for himself in real-time by generating violin passages that are sampled by the computer and repeated underneath subsequent iterations of a loop. This performance style is a game-changer for solo performers, allowing them to generate entire orchestrations without pre-recorded material. I wanted to create a work that was very much in this style, but with the added variable of extreme time manipulation. As a result, many of the phrases that Todd creates are sampled by custom software I wrote that stretches, programmatically re-orders, and blurs the musical performance to create a cinematic accompaniment off of a single live violinist.

The video for the work was created using high-speed (300fps) video of people and things in motion. The first six movements show various human-motivated actions at 1/10th their normal speed, from skaters on an ice-skating rink to children on swing-sets. The last six movements focus on four human subjects in everyday conversation, focusing on their facial and physical gestures. During the performance, the violinist’s pitch, amplitude, and performance style is analyzed by the computer to re-animate the footage by scrubbing it at different speeds and layering in different overlays that illustrate the optical flow characteristics of the video, i.e. how these objects in motion are actually moving.

The musical material is generated from twelve different equations used to determine the moment of inertia of various three-dimensional objects. As the essay online describes, the work raises questions about how these physics equations can be re-imagined in social terms: how do we compute our own moment of inertia?

turbulence.org project