Workflow: Leo Aldrey on Tonal Pizza

Leo Aldrey, a Red Bull Music Academy 2013 participant, is a composer based in Barcelona. He’s interested in interfaces: the tools and systems people use to make sounds, and how those interfaces determine the kinds of music we can make. Right now he is working on something called Tonal Pizza, in which he reimagines the gestures people use to make music, from the one-to-one relationship of pressing down a piano key to things both more intuitive and abstract.

What is Tonal Pizza?

Tonal Pizza is the name that my housemates gave to my project with a more nerdy title: “Computer-assisted interactive system for tonal navigation in real time.” It’s a software-based system that processes data from different kinds of sensors using principles of tonality to transform gestures into music. When I told my friend that the graphical representation consists of a circle with different radii and “slices” that work as a selector of “tonal ingredients,” he said, “OK, it’s like a tonal pizza.”

What inspired it?

Two ideas: playing music at a higher abstraction level than one-to-one control over pitch and volume, and collaborative music performance. I’m interested in the “grammars of music,” how chords and scales have different tendencies to move in certain directions and how they relate to the sensations of tension and relaxation in music.

Is the idea to give up control?

Ha ha! I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up control either. The idea is not to completely give up control but rather to make musical decisions at a different level of abstraction. There is still control but over macro-structures; the micro-control is left to the software.

What pieces of software and hardware technology are involved?

The software is a patch of Max for Live that I use inside Ableton Live. For the data input, the idea is to be able to use any kind of sensor (Nintendo Wii, camera, electronic drums, Phidgets, etc). At the moment, the graphical representation is implemented through a Wacom tablet.

Tonal Pizza has multiuser capabilities. How does that work?

The idea of the Tonal Pizza as a multiuser instrument consists of a group of “performers” generating data though different sensors, and a “conductor” who uses the graphical representation to determine at each moment the tonal context in which the performance will happen.

Do you have plans for turning the interface into a larger-scale consumer product?

I’m currently studying new concepts of harmony that I want to include in the system. I would love to make installations with it.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.