After months of thinking i should redo my website followed by a few extra months of procrastination. Finally it is here [insert trumpet sounds] new web site super easy to update thanks to Textpattern.
I first saw this system being used for Marian Bantjes web site. Check her work out by the way, it is simply amazing. Anyway, I thought i’d give it a go and try to resist the wordpress invasion wave by the same occasion. So far, so good! I’ve updated the site with some old work to keep trace of it. Mostly sound reactive pieces.
The quest of the visual interpretation of sound started a while back when i saw the painting “fuga” by Wassily Kandinsky in display at the Kahnweiler foundation near Basle. Few years later i met the dudes from ixi software who where presenting their music softwares. Made in Director back then, it was an impressive work that this duo managed to put together. The interface of the ixi modules could actually have been used as visual display so people could see what happens behind the scene. They have since been a long way and kept on developping their project. I found it really amazing and it gave me the idea i could do the reverse and creating graphics based on sound.
Only problem was that i had to learn how to write computer programs.
For strange2 the first act, i created a very simple swarm system where i could easily change parameters via key shortcuts such
as nodes scale, rotation speed / angles, motion speed, screen “buffer” clearing speed, video input to use as moving trails etc.. It is still on of the most versatile
piece i’ve done so so far. Showing that for a narrative visual system to work, it needs a substential number of parameters and harmonious combinaisions.
Type and images cloud.
Adding some colors for the middle of the set.
The end result : white red and black architectural shapes moving in an organic ways.
Decibelio festival is currated by Belio magazine
The festival presents short experimental films, graffiti art, performances, interactive installations and a two day long music festival.The whole thing is for free!
It was an honor and loads of fun to be part of this event and take part as Vj for Strange2 and the mighty Pan Sonic.
For Pan Sonic, i did a set split in 3 sub part : colored lines with noise effect from camera input moving along the vertical and horizontal axis as seen on the above video.
Some sound spectrum representations :
For those i used the Sonia library from Amit Pitaru and SoniaHelper for all the easing, damping.
Another sound spectrum using horizontal axis and low opacity circles to build up geometric this shape. Colors where are set by either a preloaded image or a live camera input pixel array.
For the Thrid part, i modified a previous sketch to be sound reactive and added a bit more texture to it. Here you can see me testing it with a video input, camera facing the tv showing England / Sweden. The dude in Yellow is swedish and he’s apparently not having the time of his life.
Getting away from windows and using linux ment i had to find a replacement solution for processing’s sound analys library sonia.
Here i used Pure Data to analyse the FFT. Communication between PD and processing was made via OSC. It worked but values where neither normalised nor eased out, so it looked a bit all over the shop.
Mostly made to teach myself processing and creating sound reactive animation well that was the plan… it ended up being an ever lasting suites of creative accidents.
