"I like to compare my process of making art to the composing of music. There, all expression has been subjugated to the structure and is not simply shouted." – Gerhard Richter

Standing in front of paintings by Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern exhibition a little over two years ago, my reaction was probably not that of most people. I decided to compose a piece of music in response to these artworks. But it was far from that simple.

The final piece, Portraits for a Study, will be unveiled this weekend in four venues simultaneously.

On Saturday, pianist Roderick Chadwick and the Kreutzer Quartet will perform to venues in London and Cornwall. Chadwick will be playing in person at Falmouth University's Academy of Music and Theatre Arts on a modified piano made by Yamaha called a Disklavier. Three other Disklaviers will by themselves simultaneously perform exactly what Chadwick plays to audiences at the Royal Academy of Music, Goldsmiths University and Yamaha Music London.

In the second half of the evening, the Kreutzer Quartet will play the same pieces at London's Royal Academy of Music, but this time recomposed for strings, which will be transmitted back to all the other venues via an audiovisual link created by VConect. Images of the Richter paintings that inspired me will be projected at each of the four venues alongside the musical performances.

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I have made interactions with visual artworks a central part of my work as a composer for more than a decade. Since childhood, I have always experienced music more intensely with images in my mind, and in 2002 a commission to respond to paintings by Jeremy Annear brought an astonishing realisation that I could take aspects of visual artworks such as shapes, colours, textures, patterns and intervals and translate these into ways of creating music that I would never otherwise have considered.

Since then, I have created many pieces of music responding to visual art – notably to Antony Gormley, to Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth Installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and to the Tate's Rothko show in 2008.

After the encounter with Richter's work at Tate Modern, I felt a powerful compulsion to engage with his artworks as a composer. Several things struck me about his work: the sense of distance and anonymity, the use of chance and uncertainty, multiples and sequences, blurring and erasure, and dialogue with the past. It occurred to me that I could explore aspects of the musical past, filtered through procedures of controlled chance and performed over real geographical distance. I discovered the perfect vehicle in the form of the Disklavier at Falmouth University, which can be remotely connected to other identical instruments.

I then decided that I wanted to take this idea of passing the same material through different filters even further, and I decided to recompose the same music for a completely different medium: the string quartet.

To create my musical responses to Richter, I had to find a way to engage with an artistic output that was well known for being incredibly diverse – for exploring styles from photorealism to minimalism to abstraction. I chose to limit myself largely to the scope of his realist and landscape paintings and some of the minimalist-constructed output – including 48 Portraits; paintings from the famous October Series depicting after-death images of members of the Red Army Faction (the Dead paintings); paintings of the artist's family (Aunt Marianne); a "constructed" seascape (Sea-Sea); and the stained-glass window from Cologne Cathedral (from his painting 4096 Colours).

Of all the elements present, controlled chance and uncertainty have played an enormous role throughout Portraits for a Study, in a variety of ways. We've harvested and reassembled tiny fragments of music by Bach and Beethoven, created transcriptions of photo-improvisations, applied rigid filters to large spans of material and used strict methods of cutting and reordering material. Uncertainty is also built into the performance itself: there is no way of knowing exactly how much of the data will be actually transferred between the remote Disklaviers over the internet.

These mirror Richter's own filtering strategies – the blurring, the scraping off or erasure, the palimpsest, the use of blow-up, the mechanical reproduction and the copying through which he establishes distance and anonymity.

I have sought compositional applications for all of these things: by mechanically copying a Rondo by Dussek and then blurring it almost beyond recognition through simple musical means, or by taking a fragment from the same piece, blowing it up six-fold and then completely erasing it and filling its duration with something else. In another instance, solo string pieces by Bach are buried under layers of musical "over-painting", some carefully contrived, others more coarsely applied. Multiples and sequences are used throughout the pieces, in the repatterning of assembled fragments or in more intricately ordered cutting and repositioning of segments of improvisations.

As far as we know, no one has attempted anything quite like this. There have been multiple Disklavier link-ups in the past, notably with Elton John in Los Angeles for Yamaha's 125th anniversary in 2012, but we believe no one has created an entirely new project along these lines.

In future, it may be that the work is repeated in different forms. We'd like to be able to create a phase two, with more venues and in other parts of the world – there is no geographical limit on the distance between Disklaviers that can remotely connect and perform, after all. The music itself is free-standing and as such, I hope, will be of interest to pianists for conventional performance (the piano pieces were composed for solo piano, not specifically for the Disklavier). I'm also interested in the idea of the music being experienced as an installation in a gallery, with the Disklavier performing by itself.

What began with vague ideas while standing in front of paintings by Richter has grown into one of the most demanding and complex projects I've ever worked on. Given the recent disruption across the country, we're hoping that the qualities of chance and uncertainty present in the music will also fall in our favour one more time – in terms of the weather for the performance on this coming Saturday evening.

• Portraits for a Study is at Falmouth University, the Royal Academy of Music, Goldsmith's College and Yamaha London at 7.30pm on 22 February. Tickets are free but must be pre-booked.