Graduation project
Chromatic canvas
Dean An Li
A collaborative visual music performance entails playing on a musical instrument to animate another participant’s drawings.
Give a child an instrument, pencil or crayon and they’ll simply start playing notes and drawing lines on paper. Without a desired outcome in mind, they will happily get dirty, loud and look silly. As adults, we often feel pressure to do something “perfect”, which stops us from learning through playful experimentation. Dean Li created a visually extended instrument to rekindle your explorative, childlike approach to interacting with musical instruments. Get a friend to draw on a drawing pad connected to your instrument with MIDI. Each beat on your drum or press of a key on your piano squeezes, stretches, combines and animates your partner's doodles live. The result is a collaborative visual music performance with no right or wrong, only the next note or line.