I made Patterns from Nature out of a conviction that music, film, and science are driven by similar creative impulses. Each demands a balance of rigor and intuition, of craft and experimentation. Physicist Stephen Morris, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and a longtime collaborator, studies emergent patterns in nature. His research provided a direct scientific basis, distinct from typical artistic references to the natural world. Some ideas drew from his experiments, while others developed through our conversations about how patterns form and evolve. That scientific grounding became the basis for four movements, Branches, Flow, Cracks, and Ripples. I composed the music in parallel with filmmakers Tina de Groot, Lee Hutzulak, Gita Blak, and Udo Prinsen, allowing sound and image to evolve together in response to those natural forces. We are not illustrating the science, but working with it as a foundation, something to be interpreted, reshaped, and carried through the form and motion of the piece.

Weaving improvisation into compositional architectures has been a core of my practice, allowing space for surprise and individual presence within carefully built forms. Even when working in fully composed sections, I am often imagining how a performer might respond, stretch, or reshape the material. When writing for featured soloists, I design structures that highlight their individual voices while inviting spontaneity and discovery. It is like writing a role for an actor you know well, crafting a space that supports their strengths while encouraging them to explore new emotional territory. That spirit shaped each of the four movements: pianist Matt Mitchell in Branches, which opens with a sense of curiosity and painterly motion before descending into darker resonance; percussionist Satoshi Takeishi and the Molinari String Quartet in Flow, which unfolds with meditative gravity and spectral textures; clarinetist François Houle and bassist Carlo De Rosa in Cracks, which fractures and reassembles with volatile energy; and trombonist Ryan Keberle, alongside myself on saxophone, in Ripples, which builds with sweeping force before tapering into quiet dissolution. Each soloist brought a distinctive voice to the score, helping to shape the emotional and structural arc of the film.

I approached the filmmakers in a similar way. I wanted them to work in their own visual language, but within a shared framework that would keep the piece from fragmenting. The goal was to shape each movement with clarity while preserving a sense of openness and risk.

My collaboration with Stephen Morris has developed over nearly a decade. We first worked together on Path of Totality, where he helped me plot the trajectory of a bouncing ball, which became a recurring musical motif throughout the piece. His research has continued to shape my compositional thinking, from a saxophone concerto that translated experimental crack data into melodic material, to a string quartet informed by the geometry of constellations and the physics of motion. With Patterns from Nature, I wanted to extend this exchange further. Rather than treating science as metaphor or illustration, I was interested in how physical processes could generate artistic form. Stephen’s work provided the conceptual grounding for the project, offering raw structures that shaped how both the music and the visuals could evolve.

Each filmmaker brought a distinct visual language to the project, shaped by their own methods and artistic instincts. For the first movement, Tina de Groot worked with oil paint on glass in a frame-by-frame stop-motion process, blending painterly animation with filmed material. Stephen introduced her to mocha diffusion, a process where pigment spreads into branching patterns through wet clay. She adapted the technique to develop her own visuals, which appear throughout the movement. I composed using a generative system built on simple rules, producing branching patterns similar to the way trees or blood vessels develop.

In the second movement, Lee Hutzulak created layered digital compositions from his own footage, combining environmental textures with fluid motion captured in a water tank experiment he conducted with Stephen. His intuitive, collage-like approach layers imagery into rich textures, evoking physical presence and emotional ambiguity. I used a fluid dynamics model to shape the unfolding lines in the brass and wind instruments, evolving slowly and organically.

For the third movement, Gita Blak altered 16mm film by scratching its surface, applying cracking paint, and working directly with the celluloid. Her approach explores the tension between personal memory and broader historical narratives. I drew from one of her cracked-earth photographs from Croatia to shape the large-scale musical form, and together we expanded the idea of rupture beyond the physical, responding to historical and political fracture through her archival imagery.

In the final movement, Udo Prinsen combined hand-drawn animation with digital layers derived from the Icicle Atlas, a research archive Stephen created using a laboratory icicle-growing machine built to study how they form and evolve under controlled conditions. The archive includes over 230,000 images and time-lapse videos. Udo used this data to create a cinematic zoom through an icicle’s interior. I used the same data to shape the harmonic spectrum of the movement, beginning wide and slowly converging to a single point.

This is not a documentary, an anthology, or an illustration of scientific ideas. While it draws from physics and features multiple visual artists, the film was developed as a single, integrated work, structured collaboratively but directed with a unified vision. For me, Patterns from Nature represents a deeper synthesis of the artistic and scientific dialogues I have been exploring for years. It required a different kind of attention, more like improvisation than execution, shaped by intuition, responsiveness, and trust. What emerges is a work that endeavors not to explain its ideas, but to embody them.

Quinsin Nachoff
Director / Composer, Patterns from Nature