These are paintings made out of playing. Not a picture of the music — a picture the music made while it happened.

The mixing desk sends each instrument to a computer on its own channel, and the keyboards send their actual notes alongside. So the software knows which note is being played and in what key, not merely how loud the room is. Every note is given its own color, arranged so that notes belonging together get neighboring colors and a tritone lands on the opposite side of the wheel. Tension shows up as clashing color because it is a clash.

The one rule that turns a visualizer into a painting: the canvas is never wiped.

A held chord becomes a wash. A struck note becomes spatter. Nothing is erased, so the finished image could only have come from that performance and no other. The plates below were made from two improvisations recorded the same night.

They come in two series, and the same minute of playing looks entirely different in each. Series I folds every mark around a circle, so the picture is symmetry and texture — the duet as atmosphere. Series II lets harmony build the structure instead: the key chooses the palette, distance from the middle is harmonic distance rather than pitch, and the edge of the painting only expands while the music is unresolved. Play something consonant and it stops spreading and starts deepening.

Neither of us authors the result. The rules are written in advance and never adjusted mid-performance; everything unpredictable comes from the playing. That is the whole appeal of the arrangement.