Dan Tepfer - Natural Machines

Dan Tepfer brings Natural Machines to the Timashev Recital Hall at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Sunday, November 15, at 3 PM. It's a performance that sits somewhere between a piano recital and a live coding experiment, and it's built around a conversation between a person and a machine.

Here's how it works: Tepfer sits at the keyboard and improvises, and as he plays, a Steinway Spirio player piano responds in real time. He's programmed the player piano to listen to what he's doing and react to it, so the two end up in a dynamic dialogue. The player piano isn't just playing back a recording; it's responding to his choices as he makes them, and Tepfer, in turn, responds to what the machine throws back at him. There are animated visuals to go along with it, too, so you can see the interaction as it happens.

Tepfer is a Brooklyn-based pianist, composer, and coder, and Natural Machines is one of the projects that puts those three roles in the same room. He's known for his jazz albums and for Goldberg Variations/Variations, a project that takes Bach's Goldberg Variations and weaves in his own improvisations. Natural Machines is a different kind of exploration, one where he's thinking about what a musical instrument can be when it's part machine.

It's a Sunday afternoon show, which fits the kind of thing this is—something you can really sit with and watch unfold. The performance is at the Timashev Recital Hall inside the Wexner Center for the Arts, 114 W Broad St, Columbus, OH 43210, starting at 3 PM on Sunday, November 15.