Photo courtesy of Paul Amitai
Paul Amitai
Paul Amitai
Paul Amitai is returning to Milwaukee for his first performance in 20 years. He was the 2025 winner of the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award and was, at the turn of this century, the Shepherd Express’ technology columnist. He has lived in New York for several years, honing advanced ideas that wed music with high tech and the present with tradition
At his 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 27 performance at Lynden Sculpture Garden, Amitai will present Trope Variations, an improvisational vocal performance based on an ancient Hebrew musical notation system. In Jewish liturgics, trope is a set of symbols that convey meaning as well as melody. In Trope Variations, those symbols become visual prompts for the singer while providing visual information for the audience.
I discussed the concept with the composer.
I’m sensing a sort of John Cage, playing with variables and apparent randomness in Trope Variations. Am I on the right track?
I started to think about the potential of using this graphic system as a prompt for live improvisation. The idea was influenced by John Cage's use of the I Ching to determine the shape of his performances. I was also influenced by Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards that provide starting points for creative ideation more broadly, not specifically tied to music. The initial idea I had was sort of a hybrid of these precedents, where I might have a deck of cards with the trope symbols on them that could be used as the starting point of a vocal improvisation.
Can you describe what this will look and sound like from the audience’s perspective?
I was also imagining that the cards themselves could function like QRcodes, using the cards to trigger audio files. In this way, each card would be associated with an audio sample of the trope melody being sung. This technological interface was inspired by a project called “The World Series of Tubing” that was developed by two artists, Jeff Crouse and Aaron Meyers, when I was working as a curator at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center in NYC. Jeff and Aaron's project was like the World Series of Poker, but as an augmented reality card game, each player's hand contained a set of cards that would trigger a YouTube video to play when a card was placed in front of a web camera. Jeff and Aaron built custom software for an interactive system using image tracking, where the camera recognizes each card as unique and associated with a different video.
During the live competition-performance, two competitors would play their best videos, and the audience would vote on their favorite. The audience could see a video projection of the players' hands with the cards, but the YouTube videos were digitally superimposed over the cards.
That YouTube performance happened a long time ago in 2009, but it stayed in the back of my mind as a promising interface for live audio improvisation. It felt like a progression of the way I had used turntables and loop pedals in the past to do live sampling and processing of sounds. Instead of records, I was wondering what if the cards could become visual/physical proxies for the audio samples, and the cards become part of a visual/physical interface for live performance. What if you could place a row of cards down on a table to create a progression or sequence of multiple audio samples, like a step sequencer, but using images.
If you've even been to a museum and used your smartphone to click on the QRcode on the gallery wall, and then had an audio or video file open on your phone, it's essentially the same idea, but with augmented reality, the digital video/audio is superimposed over the camera image in real time.
You hired the Tubing project’s Jeff Crouse to make the “image sequencer”?
Built for my iPhone, this tool uses image tracking to recognize and play audio files of my own voice singing the trope melodies. I can arrange the cards like modules to build more complex melodies from the individual trope motifs.
The trope melodies have been extracted from their ritual function, and abstracted into vowel sounds, so the performance becomes a wordless vocalization. I build the arrangement in real time, run the sequence through guitar effects pedals to create textural soundscapes, and then sing over it live. The result is like a cross between a sound bath and an ambient music performance.
When I've performed Trope Variations previously, I also projected video of the iPhone image sequencer, so the audience could see how the sequence was progressing from one image/sound to the next.
So what will it look like?
The images are drawings/paintings I made directly on the covers of cantorial music album sleeves. On each album contains the trope symbol and a visual representation of the melody, which serves as a graphic score. The vertical position of the shapes represent pitch; horizontal position represents the progression or order of the melodic notes. The colors also relate to pitch, as well as intensity. Size and shape suggest volume and timbre/texture. Layering this information on top of the portraits of cantors suggests that the performance is part of longer lineage, and a longer history of the intersection between liturgical and secular signing (many of these cantors were also notable opera singers or performed outside of the synagogue). The images become a kind of palimpsest. And on the functional side, they contain enough visual complexity so that the iPhone camera recognizes each image as distinct and triggers the correct audio file to play.
This will be Trope Variation’s Milwaukee premiere. You have performed it elsewhere?
I've thus far performed twice in NYC (at Reforesters Lab and Crown Hill Theatre, both shows in May 2026) and have another performance coming up later in the fall in Brooklyn.
