Still Life is a new work by Yixuan Zhao, realised in two separate versions. The piano solo version was commissioned by Spanish pianist Laura Farré Rozada, M4C Ph.D candidate at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and was officially released by Seed Music in January 2021, as part of Laura’s album ‘Nimbus’, with the title Still Life “Dedicated to Laura”.

A second, interactive music version was performed by RBC Master’s student Chen Sim Cheng.

Yixuan devoted her residency at Integra Lab to explore the relationship between acoustic instruments and technology. The purpose of Still Life is to provide the performer with a more accessible technological performance environment. Without changing the traditional performance techniques, it provides the performer with more control on timbral aspects of the sound. An interactive system that can be controlled by the performer himself has been established, which links the performance techniques parameters of the traditional piano with the parameters of the electronic effects, so that the performer can use the traditional piano performance techniques to play the piano and live electronics simultaneously.

Still Life is divided into 10 sections (ABCDEFGHIJ), containing 10 interactive scenarios. Each interaction scenario includes the use of a single module or the use of multiple modules. The on-site microphone detects five features of the incoming sound (Attack Peak, Loudness, Frequency, Spectrum Centroid, Partials) in real time, and then maps them to the internal parameters of four modules (four electronic effects are composed of Reverb, Flange, Comb Filters, Pitch Accumulation, Overtone Separation, and other effects in a single or superimposed way).