Soundpainting

Soundpainting is a universal multi-disciplinary live-composing sign language for every kind of artist (musicians, actors, dancers, visual artists), and is still evolving since its creation in 1974 by Walter Thompson in Woodstock, New York. Soundpainting gives to the soundpainter (the composer) the possibility to compose multi-disciplinary creations in real time by signing gestures (more than 1500 different signs in 2023) to indicate the material the performers will realize and the soundpainter will shape into the composition. History Short overview of sign languages in the history of composition Beginning in the middle of the 20th century there were several musicians who invented and used some form of sign language to compose in the moment. Some notable ones were Earle Brown, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Alan Silva and Butch Morris. In the early 1950s, American composer Earle Brown wrote December 1952. Inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, he proposed a new way of writing and composing music, using open-form ways of composing. For instance, in Calder Piece (first performed at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris in 1966), he used a mobile from Alexander Calder that he would call a “chef d'