Keyboardist and electronic composer Kara-Lis Coverdale doesn’t tailor her concert programs to suit whoever’s booking her, yet she’s still a perfect fit for this weekend’s New Forms Festival. Not only is she recognized for her work with new technologies such as data streaming and digital signal processing, she’s going to be presenting a selection of previously unheard compositions.

“At this point, I’m kind of sorting through things I’ve created and then grouping them together for a future release, and I’m not yet sure what it is I’ve made,” she explains in a Skype conversation from Montreal, where she’s based. “So I’m using this tour as a workshop to kind of see what I’ve done, hoping for some feedback. But so it goes in the land of experimentalism!”

Coverdale does allow that her new pieces are a linear progression from those featured on her recent albums A 480 (2014) and Aftertouches (2015), although that gives only a vague indication of what we can expect to hear at New Forms.

The two records are quite different. A 480, for instance, is a spare, even monochromatic collection of ambient works built on sampled and then extensively manipulated data sounds—both synthesized voices and the incidental noise of data transmissions.

“I think data is like the medium of our time,” Coverdale says. “It’s the transmission of our time, and I felt that it should be used as a musical source. Any instrument is reflective of its time: the piano, even, or the organ, or the 808 [a genre-defining Roland drum machine], or early Buchla-synthesizer music. These are snapshots into our musical timeline, and you can’t be looking back all the time and using instruments from the ’70s and ’60s. You kind of have to consider what is now.”

Aftertouches, in contrast, is more keyboard-centric, often taking off from the kind of simple but atmospheric chord progressions that typify radio pop—a genre Coverdale’s loved ever since her days as a preteen piano prodigy.

“It’s not like I’m intentionally doing that; it probably just came up quite naturally,” she explains. “There were always a lot of pop-music songbooks around my house, and on Saturdays I would play through them for hours. I’ve always had a really close relationship with pop music, but I don’t really try to invoke it; it’s just kind of what comes out.”

What one won’t hear in Coverdale’s music, whether she’s working with abstract forms or familiar chord structures, is much in the way of traditional virtuosity—even though she’s a very skilled pianist and pays her rent by working as a church organist. She does, however, credit teaching herself how to play the organ with predisposing her to an almost scientific interest in tone production.

“When I started working with synthesizers,” she notes, “I think it was a lot more intuitive because of that. You have a much more concrete sense of sound-layering and pitching, because you literally know the difference between a four-inch pipe and an eight-inch pipe and a 12-inch pipe, and what that means for creating a timbre.”

She also eschews extroverted displays of emotion, preferring to create a sonic environment onto which the listener can project his or her own feelings—an aesthetic that aligns well with her own sense of being “a vessel” when she plays.

“I often think that a lot of musics are very ‘hot’, in that they speak at you, and they tell you how to feel,” she says. “Fewer musics are inviting and allow you to think for yourself and project your own thoughts into that particular music. It’s more of a communication in the latter, and that’s what I always try to create. I’m not interested in speaking at someone; I’m interested in discourse.”

New Forms 16 runs at 560 Seymour Street on Friday and Saturday (October 7 and 8).