Streams II for piano started on a whim as an experiment to see what would happen if I adapted my piece Streams, originally for the cello, to the piano, and it spiraled out of control into a full-blown piece. The idea is based on the psychoacoustic phenomenon of how we group notes into melodies or lines based on their duration and proximity in frequency and time. I believe the term “streams” was coined by Albert Bregman in his seminal book Auditory Scene Analysis, and I wanted to see what would happen if this was the core idea for a musical work. The threshold for when notes start to segregate into separate streams is roughly a 5th, so that was the opening choice of intervals, which works perfectly on the cello.

The interesting thing about the cello piece is the unpredictable ways in which contact point influences the timbre of any given sound. The piano is much more rigid in that domain, and it demanded its own identity. New patterns were formed, new possibilities and registers opened up. Check out the MIDI rendition of the piece here: