Presque Rider

Presque Rider approaches the concept of a "score" in the spirit of casual gaming: two performers battle for victory in a "racing game" by completing electroacoustic challenges that are analysed in real time.

Each unlocked "level" adds layers of sonic complexity in the form of additional processing. The source sounds stay minimalistic; timbre and structure emerge from the processing itself. The piece is organised in movements, each one exhibiting a unique musical character, and the players' progress is presented to the audience as a global game map for every movement.

Playful and casual on the surface, the work engages two critical notions of contemporary music discourse:

• The recursivity of the musical score. Traditional composition rests on an a-posteriori ontology of the score: some material rendition, if only in the composer's mind, must precede it. In Presque Rider this fact is implanted directly in the pattern-recognition algorithms that drive the performance.
• Interactions between human and non-human players. While not a strictly novel trope, there have been few instances of endowing a game AI with musical listening capabilities and engaging it on stage.

A first demo of the AI live pattern recognition:

Reduced version of the audience screen with simulated input: