 Welcome to The Creative Life, a collaborative production of Think Tech Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. I'm your host, Darlene Boyd, and our guest for today's show is Dan Tepfer, a pianist, composer of wide-ranging ambition, individuality, and drive. Dan has performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music and released 10 albums of his own, perhaps more at this point. As Dan discusses the intersection between science and art, between coding and improvisation, between digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart, you can expect to be wowed. Dan, welcome to The Creative Life. I've had a chance to read your bio as I was visiting your website. And I've learned that you grew up in France studying classical piano and obsessively improvising jazz at home. And you say that your deepest roots lie in jazz and improvisation. Seems to me that jazz and improvisation is such a unique art form and unique to the performer doing it. What would you say? Yeah, the beauty of jazz and improvisation is that what you're looking for is to speak in your own voice. So for example, in classical music, there's a long tradition of improvisation. But the emphasis is usually put on, for example, being able to play in the style of Mozart or being able to improvise in the style of Beethoven. Whereas in jazz, what we really work on, what we value the most is a musician that's able to improvise in their own voice. And that's something that's very important to me because if you can get familiar enough with the language of music to really improvise in it and you can speak as yourself, then that's what making art is all about. So in jazz, we're really being artists within improvisation. We talk about the creative process here on the creative life. And I think many of us that study creativity and those that are practicing creativity in their lives and leave creative lives, we agree that the heart of creativity comes down to the content, the process, and the product. They all three need to be addressed. And clearly in the limited time that I've had to listen and watch your YouTube videos, which are just fascinating, clearly you improvise in all three. Would you share a little bit about your creative process? Yeah, I feel like it's different every time. But for me, the creative process starts with ideas. I like to say that ideas are digital and feelings are analog. And what I mean by that is that feelings are hard to pin down and that's the beauty of feelings, is that they morph in these very subtle ways. But ideas have this power, which is that you can define them exactly. Like I am passionate about the specific thing and I want to carry this very specific thing out. And I think what's beautiful about an idea is that it can be this germ that just takes root in you and then over a very long time, it can grow to something that is like nothing you'd imagined before. So for example, my project, Goldberg Variations Variations, started with me getting really passionate about Bach's Goldberg Variations, which is one of the iconic pieces of classical music. And I just started playing it and learning the pieces, learning the variations in it, learning the music as it was written by Bach. And of course, this idea came to me, which is, wait a minute, what would happen if I used Bach's ideas in this piece as the basis for improvisation? What if I improvised using the same ideas he's using in each variation? And that over the course of about 10 years became my project, Goldberg Variations Variations. And it's been hugely important to me, but I would never have known when I started getting interested in this music and started improvising on it, that it would lead to something that's had this kind of resonance for me. So it's really about that germ of an idea, letting it grow, I think often over a very long period of time. So thank you for sharing your personal process. And I think those of us who attempt to work with creative individuals or even are trying to solve a problem, realize that there's a tenacity and a stick-tuitiveness that has to be there. And as I learned more about you, to me, you exemplify that. You just referenced the 10-year process, but you went through a five-year process. Is that correct with a special project? Yeah, I think you might be talking about natural machines, which is my latest kind of super special project in the sense that it's something I'm really excited about and that is pretty unique to me. This is a project where I've written computer algorithms that improvise with me in real time. So what that means is I'll literally be doing free improvisation at the piano and the computer is able to have the information regarding every note that I play because I'm using a special piano called the Disclavier by Yamaha. And the computer responds in real time with music of its own. So, you know, for example. And as you can see, I've also written other programs that generate a visual representation of the music as it's happening. So that's just one of the many algorithms I've written that form this album, Natural Machines, and I keep writing more. And as you mentioned, Natural Machines is a project that I've been working on since I think about 2015, something like that. So it's been, maybe it was 2014, so it's been five or six years or seven years. And at first it was just, what really started off was discovering this instrument, the Yamaha Disclavier, which is a player piano. As you can see, it's able to play all by itself. You can see the keys moving all by themselves there. Yeah, so this instrument is purely a robot. It'll do what you tell it to do. And it'll also tell you what notes are being played. So when I discovered this instrument, it doesn't really do anything on its own, except it's able to play back recordings of what you've played or other people have played. But when I discovered this instrument, I realized that I could program it in real time to respond to what I'm actually playing. And so that was the germ of this idea, but it actually goes way further back because when I was a kid, my dad brought back a computer from his lab, because he's a biologist, and I started programming when I was about nine years old, very, very simple things. And even though I never formally studied programming, I kept coding my entire life, it's all something that I've really, really loved to do. And so when I discovered this instrument, the Amaha Disquivir, then it was like, ding, I can use these programming chops that I've been honing my whole life, and I can bring that together with my work becoming proficient at improvisation, which I've also been working on my whole life. And that's gonna, I think, do something special when it comes together. But I didn't even know it was gonna be special. I just loved the idea, and I dove in, and six years later, I put out this album, Natural Machines. So getting back to your best friend, how did you come upon this? Did you just go to a catalog, or were there other musicians that you were involved with that you had recognized had used this? So this piano is actually on loan to me from Yamaha, and the reason I got involved with Yamaha was that this earlier project I mentioned, Goldberg Variations Variations, I made it at a time when I had won a few piano competitions, but I wasn't super well established as an artist, and I needed a ton of time in the studio to work this out. In fact, I ended up recording the whole album three different times in three different ways. So I was looking for a place where I'd be able to play in silence with a beautiful instrument, using my own gear, and I signed as a Yamaha artist, and they let me use their space in Midtown Manhattan. So I've recorded all my albums since 2010 in that space, and so it was a few years later, I went into that space and sat down on one of these discloviers and started playing around with it and realized, oh yeah, this is not just an instrument that can play back pre-recorded things, it's an instrument that can do things in real time. So obviously far more sophisticated and advanced as to the old, or maybe there are new versions of a player piano, it's certainly not that, it has- Well, it is in a way, it's like the modern version of a player piano. You know, this definitely goes way back to like the late 19th century, early 20th century when those player pianos were playing what was written on a scroll, or a piano roll. The only difference being that instead of a piano roll, the information relative to what the piano's supposed to play is in digital form. And since it's in digital form, I can tell it what to play in real time. So I saw you lean over when we first started the interview and you pulled, I'm sorry to be so low key in my question here, but you pulled at something, what were you doing? You leaned over and- Yeah, I connected a cable that goes into this computer, it's a MIDI cable. MIDI is a language that computers use to talk about music with each other. And I connected the MIDI cable to my computer so that the piano and my computer could talk, because all the programs are programs I've written that are living in my computer. So, you know, for example, here's one that turns everything I play upside down. This is called, this is what we call inversion in music. Begin to imagine what it must be like to be in a concert with you in one of your concerts. Am I correct? Yeah, this is a fun project because it's different every time because it's all about free improvisation. This is a project where instead of writing a piece, instead of composing a piece, I'm writing the way that a piece works. And this is I think an interesting part of creativity is when you start to separate the idea of a finished product in its details from the idea of process. And what we can do is instead of creating finished products, we can create processes. And the beauty of creating a process is that every time you engage with that process, you can do it differently. Now, not every pianist can choose to do this. And so do you have a background? Did you, I know you must have studied something in computer and clearly in reading about you, you have quite a unique background, but... Well, I actually never studied computer science at all. I never studied programming. It's something that was completely self-taught for me. But as I said earlier, I got into it when I was about nine or 10 years old. So I was born in 1982. So when I was getting into it, we didn't even have the internet. So it was all just like reading the user manual and going to the library and borrowing books. But I did study physics in my undergrad. My undergrad is an astrophysics. So I've always loved science. I've always loved math and physics. And that's an important part of my life, but the computer science is all self-taught. Do you think your background in physics influences some of, do we see some of that in the graphics that emerge? Or am I, what would I call that? Your visuals that we see. Yeah, you could call them visuals. You could call them a live score or anything you like to. Oh, I'll try to remember that. Because, you know, in many of these algorithms, I'm actually representing the music very exactly. Like here's one called constant motion. So in this one, time goes by radially, right? And when a note is low, it's closer to the center of the radius. And when it's high, it's further at the outside. So in addition, so what I'm playing here is in white. And you notice I play our white. And then the computer, this algorithm that I've written, either responds below what I've written or above. And if it's below or if it's above, like what just happened here, it's in green. And if it's below, like what happened there, it's in red. So these are decisions I've taken to represent the music in a certain way because what I'm trying to do is show the structure of the music. This is a different one called Canon at the octave, where everything I play is repeated an octave below. And so what I play was in the foreground there in blue. What the computer plays is in yellow. What I'm trying to do there is just really show the relationships between these two voices really clearly. But then in some of the other algorithms I've written, I've decided to not show every note that I'm playing, but rather show a deeper principle about the music. So for example, this is called triad sculpture. And this is all about creating three-dimensional representations of the harmonies that I play in my left hand. So if I play this, for example, that is a minor triad, and this is an exact representation of the ratios between the frequencies of this harmonic structure. So in this case, in the time that the lowest note vibrates 10 times, the middle one vibrates 12 times, the upper one vibrates 15 times, and that's what I'm showing in this figure. If I do a major triad, which is this, you see that's a completely different figure, and those are ratios 4 to 5 to 6. So much simpler ratios than you see that right away. And if I do something like this, you see we get some really crazy shapes. And I just love these figures because they're both profoundly true from a physical perspective, but also to me, profoundly beautiful and elegant. So really it's a completely creative project and since I'm writing all the programs, I can do whatever I want. So check this out, for example. Here's three octaves, which is just this stretched out figure 8. But what happens if I start to detune them? This is in exact relationships of 1 to 2 to 4. But if I start to put out a tune, this happens, and you get this stretching of the figure. And I've also, I wonder what it would be like to travel inside the figure? You see that little dot that's traveling around inside the figure? Here's what it looks like from inside. And I can keep playing during this time. So right now I'm showing these to you at the level of just ideas, right? I'm showing you some of the processes involved, but of course in performance and on the album, I'm making real pieces out of these. I'm improvising stories within these processes. Stories that have a beginning, development, and an end. They're still completely improvised. None of this is planted in advance. But I'm engaging in that more spiritual process inside myself of telling a musical story to my audience, which is not exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm just kind of showing you little bits and pieces of the processes involved. Well, since you mentioned telling the audience a story, a spiritual story in the sense of, I found that fractal trees on your album, I found, well, perhaps because in our work in creativity, there was an author many years ago that wrote a book called Grow or Die. And I think you would all agree that the creativity, if we don't feed it, will die off. So that was in my mind as I kept looking at the tree growing. And then thank you for demonstrating how you get, how we as the viewer can get inside those graphics because I felt that with the tree. So I did feel a real connection. Not trying to give my opinion, but I would encourage our viewers to give a look since everything is available. You're so generous with what you offer on YouTube. Well, I just have this belief that we as artists are here to create art and that if we make art that has any kind of resonance in the world, the world will take care of us in some way or another. And I think that's a belief that's been validated for me many times in my life. So, yeah, I love to kind of give as much stuff as I can. For example, Natural Machines is an album I released both as a CD and it's also on the streaming services and all that. And as a video playlist on YouTube. So it's just completely freely accessible. You can see the 11 tracks by going to DanTepfer.com slash natural machines or just go to my website DanTepfer.com and you can find it there. You can also just go to YouTube and search for DanTepfer Natural Machines and it'll come right up there as well. Should I show a little bit of this fractal tree you mentioned? I would love if you did. I really would. Just a personal desire. This is a fun one. It's one of the only algorithms I've written where I don't even play the piano. Let me try this again. What a treat. Dan, you didn't invite me to sing with you. Oh, my God. If only I had known. Oh, that's right. That's right. I was going to... Oh, Mike, we're just down to a few minutes left. But I did want to comment and ask you about the duos that you have been with in your performance. And when Kristen watches this, they just have to say that your performance, the Australia combo when she was in Australia and you were improvising with her, it was just so enjoyable. She seems like a wonderful person. Yeah. So, you know, during the pandemic, what's really become apparent to me is that we need to find other ways of connecting authentically through music when we can't actually be physically together in the same space. And so I worked very hard on low latency audio through the entire pandemic, and I'm still working very hard on it. And these are ways through software of reducing the lag between the moment when I make a sound and the moment when it's heard in the earphones of the person I'm playing with. And so during the pandemic, I was using an open source project from Stanford called Jack Trip that I ended up contributing to. But the problem with Jack Trip is it's incredibly hard to use. And so I've now released an app called Far Play that makes low latency audio accessible to absolutely everybody. And I really encourage everybody to check it out. Just go to farplay.io, farplay.io, and you can download it for free and check it out. And it enables you to make music with other people through the internet as long as they're not insanely far away from you to the point where it feels like they're in the same room with you. And we could use that for conversation also, obviously, as I watched. So I look forward to... It makes conversation feel so much more natural. It's really crazy. Because we're so used to interjecting when we talk, be like, oh, yeah, you know, or... Yes, yes. And on Zoom, there's so much latency between the time when we say something and the response comes that it feels kind of awkward. And so with Far Play, you don't get that. Dan, we are out of time on behalf of our viewers and some of the folks that I know that are watching. We're so glad you came into our life today. And hopefully to keep in touch with you and wish you well. And we'll be following you, Dan. Absolutely. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And congrats on a great show. Thank you. I look forward to watching more episodes with other people. All right. Thank you for joining me. You're host for today's The Creative Life Show and our guest, Dan Tepfer. Join us again in two weeks for our next show as we continue to bring you individuals demonstrating their passion for living the creative life. Aloha.