Punkte is a collaborative project between Roth Michaels, percussion and John Aylward, keyboards. The project centers around improvisation with real time audio processing. Michaels and Aylward, both veteran improvisers, use advanced electro-acoustic techniques to treat their instruments as both controls and source signals for real time audio processing and synthesis.
Punkte improvisations are created first through a phase of pre-composition where basic musical materials are discovered. The gestures, motives and phrases discovered in this initial phase are then used as raw material to dialogue with the live electronics in a second phase of experimentation. In this learning phase, Michaels and Aylward teach the electronics the parameters in which it can respond to the raw materials of the composition. Through a final process of refinement, the basic gestures and motives of the work combine, sometimes unexpectedly, with the learned responses of the live electronics.