(2025)
Orijentacija 2 is a followup to a work of the same name for solo violin, flashlight operator, and video projection, orijentacija 1, serving largely as a prototype and platform for “psychological experimentation” in the context of concert music. Central to the orijentacija series is the experiential impact of live performance on the psychology of a player, the second iteration leading toward solo performance mediated by electroencephalographic (EEG) technologies. In 2025, I purchased a portable EEG headset, the Emotiv Epoch x, which allows me to send live updates of my brain activity into programs such as Max or TouchDesigner over OSC.
In orijentacija 2, a player engages in visualizations, controlling mental commands which are programmed to trigger sounds inside a Max patch, partly repurposed from orijentacija 1. In addition, a realtime stream of energy levels across many brain frequencies are triggering sounds as they reach a certain threshold of intensity. As a fairly traditional concert violinist myself (keeping my composition and performance lives well separated, as opposed to fused), I have always been fascinated by my violin professors’ suggestions to visualize a scene while performing, often leading to very elaborate descriptions of nature, locations, out-of-body experiences like picturing oneself performing from the end of a hall, and more. This side of performance is mostly hidden from listeners, and I like to imagine that the act of composition allows an audience to peek inside the inner world of composers from across time, with the quality of a performance correlating to a performer or ensemble’s ability to convey that inner world to a listener. My goal for orijentacija 2 — and the subsequent • for [solo instrument] series — is to place that internal world of a player or performer directly on stage as a duet partner.
orijentacija 2 should be interpreted as a prototype, a proof of concept, and I would like to make that very clear as my performance and composition practices are very separated in taste and in purpose. They certainly inform one another, but I do not consider myself a composer-performer in any sense, which I feel adds to the vibrancy of my musical life. Given the EEG project’s novelty, recentness, I had to record the improvisatory piece myself to demonstrate how this project may develop. As it stands today, a noticeable aspect of the work is a correlation between increasing and decreasing activity in the playing and the frequency of the triggers in the electronics. Another is a massive increase in focus as I attempt to manipulate mental commands, which are trained on my visualization of a cube moving in an imaginary 3D space, taking so much of my attention that my playing clearly suffers. It is apparent to me that a player will need a great deal of time to practice with this technology going forward, but the project is a firm success.
NBComp 