The final hurdle

i’ve been researching into current practices in VJing and looking at some of the guys pushing the boundries in this area and this installation is nothing short of amazing!

Etienne De Crecy Live 2007 Transmusicales de Rennes from Clement bournat on Vimeo.

p.s.

turns out that mtv and the killers ripped this off quite badly - see link below

http://blog.antivj.com/2008/exyzt-installation-ripped-off-by-the-killers

Sparsh Multitouch Display from anirudh on Vimeo.

This is just a small update on some of the key research i have been doing for my final project, for which i have been looking at interactive and immersive audio/visual environments.

Visual space music

Visual Space Music Introduction (HD) from Ian McKinlay on Vimeo.
One of the first projects i saw which encouraged me to continue looking into this area was Visual space music by Ian McKinlay from the City University of Hong Kong. In his own words visual space music is

“The VSM installation is a musical instrument, a unique space-based arrangement tool, a surround sound spatial mixer, a real-time 3D visualizer. More importantly however, it is the combination of these things; a surreal experience in an electronic world.”

I really liked the idea of visual space music and it started to make me think about other ways environments like this could be used, perhaps as a creative tool for making music and visual entertainment, a bit like VJ’ing but with the visuals and audio actually linked together. Find out more at - http://mememamo.com/vsm/

AudioVisual Environment Suite

Once i started looking into the possibilities of using visual art to create music at the same time i discovered the AudioVisual Environment Suite which is a set of software tools that allow the user to create animations and sound in real time using gestures, it is well described on the website for the project.

“The Audiovisual Environment Suite (AVES) (1998-2000: Golan Levin) is set of seven interactive software systems which allow people to gesturally create and perform abstract animation and synthetic sound in real time. Each environment is an experimental attempt to design an interface which is supple and easy to learn, yet can also yield interesting, infinitely variable and personally expressive performances in both the visual and aural domains”

My Idea

After looking at these projects and some other similar ideas, i had an idea of what i wanted to do, which was to create an immersive environment that would allow the user to create and manipulate musical content in a way that allowed them to create a visual environment that showed what was happening to the music.

Some of the key things i want my project to be able to do are:

• Allow the user to assign sounds samples to objects in a 3d world which could then be manipulated visually.
• Create sounds from visuals using gesture drawing or some other form of drawing input, which can also be assigned to objects in the 3d world.

• Allow them to do this for a performance so that elements of the sound and visuals could be pre-constructed and then also manipulated in real-time.
• Let them define a ‘path’ to flow through the world which defines when sounds are started and stopped or when effects are applied to the rather than traditional time-based sequencing.

The ‘Flow’

Recently after seeing the game Auditorium, i decided on how the sounds in the world would be told to start playing.
Auditorium uses the concept of ‘flow’ which is a stream of particles that are direct by the user into bars of sound to start it playing. i really liked this idea and thought that it would be great way to let the user decide the order in which sounds are started playing by letting them draw the path the flow would take through the 3d world therefore providing a visualisation of the order of the music.

auditorium

Technologies

After a lot of research into the technologies i could use i have settled on two pieces of software that will be combined to create this tool.

• Max/msp for capturing drawing input and turning it into synthesised sound. maybe also using it for the manipulation of samples.
• Flash with the use of a 3d library such as Papervision3d or Away3d for displaying the visual side of the world.
• Flash could also be used for some of the sound manipulation of samples as it now has very good sound capabilities