A presentation of a novel, entirely custom developed system, for facilitating the live performance of Visual Music / abstract animation. The hypothesis is that by using musical instruments as the primary user interface for the performance, we may usefully re-map the embodied/enactive knowledge that musicians have of their instruments. Musicians may then perform live visual music, taking advantage of the expressivity their instruments afford them. For this work, a new control data mapping strategy had to be developed, of ‘Mutable Mapping’, which entails manually manipulating the mapping during a performance, gradually altering and re-routing digital control data.

The survey is reached using the link below, and should not take you more than 10-15 minutes to complete:

www.surveygizmo.com/s/204226/visual-music-1

I have not disclosed too many details now, because that may influence the way you answer. Rest assured I will post all the details when the survey is closed.

Thanks!

EDIT: I have now compiled the results and written up a research paper describing them, which has been submitted for review towards publication in a journal. As soon as the results have been published, I’ll also post a summary here!

New features in Mother 0.6:

• Small mistakes fixed from previous 0.5 release: Waltz synth example was not working, and I failed to mention in the documentation that you also need the Shapetween library to develop new synths.

• More comprehensive secondary screen support introduced.

• pre(), draw(), post() and dispose() methods are now called properly in synth libraries.

• It is no longer necessary to put an Init() method in sketches intended as Synths for Mother (Finally!).

As always, you can download the latest version from the Google code repository!

First is a live video to sound perceptual substitution program, followed by an application that uses an image as a score for a virtual 32-piece classical orchestra. Both are featured from 12:20 onwards, but of course the whole talk is a very interesting watch!

New features in Mother 0.5:

• Updated to use Processing 1.0.7
• Performance is much improved
• Stability is also greatly improved (a hard to debug multi-threading problem was fixed)
• OSX-port implemented

The OSX port was possible thanks to the contributions of Krzysztof Golinski and Splatgirl, many thanks to both of them! Krzysztof also designed the great graphic above for the Mother project.

So go ahead and download the latest version from the Google code repository!

I was amazed at how many people and institutions are working with visual music that I was unaware of!

The symposium was of great interest, and I really hope it will be the start of a yearly recurrent event.

Maura McDonnell has created a very thorough overview of the event on her visual music blog, it is well worth heading over there and following the very thorough list of links she compiled related to the symposiums presentations.

My motivation for developing the Mother system has always been to perform with it in a live setting, accompanying a live musical performance.

My musical tastes are quite broad (but see my last.fm profile if you’re curious), so I am looking for any musical genre that would work well with the type of visual material I am able to produce: abstract and generated digitally in real-time.

If you haven’t already, please have a look at the videos I have uploaded to Vimeo, to get an idea of what visuals I am capable of creating.

In order for my system to work, musicians will either need to be using live instruments, or programs such as Ableton Live, so that I have enough MIDI and audio channels to use as control input for the visuals.

The timeframe is from now until mid January 2010, and I’d prefer to collaborate with musicians living in or near London where I currently live. The collaboration would be free of charge, and the only thing I expect in return is that musicians agree to be interviewed about their experience, so that I can write about it in my thesis.

If you are a musician and collaborating sounds appealing to you, please get in touch!

I have just uploaded yet another new video of mine to Vimeo!

The software used for the visuals is Mother 0.4, a free open source program I’ve developed for VJ-ing with multiple Processing.org sketches. See related posts below for more details on the Mother program.

All graphics are procedurally rendered in real-time, and are controlled solely through musical notation data (MIDI), and multi-channel pitch, amplitude and beat detection.

The music I have also made myself, using all hardware analog and digital synthesizers, and an electronic drum kit.