Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.

Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Gavin writes:

It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.

I’ve written a VST to go in slicer channels tool.

Sync Ableton Live to Isadora using a Pluggo VST from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.

The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:

I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!

AV Slicer Tutorial - Ableton 7 Slicer with Isadora from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Lots more information at Gavin’s site, Boredbrands Digital Funfair.

He needs someone to build the Mac plug-in, so Max users, if you’re game, go for it!

AV Sync Tutorial

AV Slicer Tutorial

Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.

Our friend Sean Healy, aka Jean Poole, has a great interview with visualist *spark (Toby Harris of London). We love *spark for many reasons — for founding AVit, for being a wildly-talented artist, for reintroducing the idea of narrative to visualism, for VJing live on a giant touchscreen (see below), and other goodness, not necessarily in that order. Toby talks to Sean about everything from his philosophy of performance to some of the technical possibilities of audiovisual performance today.

I particularly like what *spark has to say about live cinema, and why the tools are “hotting up”:

That term ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of whats good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with audiences’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto. Stepping back from that, I’m interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways, which has taken me from playing with the conventions of one-man theatre to storytelling installations. And the tools are really hotting up at the moment, things are getting interesting.

*sparkin’ it up [Skynoise.net]

Speaking of hotting it up, check out that potent combination of Ableton Live (for music) and VDMX (for visuals) on a MacBook Pro. It’s a coupling we’re seeing more of these days. (And it doesn’t necessarily have to be Live and VDMX per se, or even one laptop — but people exploring real audiovisual soundtrack means Live Cinema can be sonic as well as visual.) Those of you working on similar setups, we’d love to see them. Whether it goes on Create Digital Music or Create Digital Motion — well, I can flip a coin.

Lighting designers rely on DMX in a similar way that electronic musicians use MIDI; it’s the glue which binds their performance together. Many older (as in age, not experience) VJs I meet have come to live video performance through a profession in lighting. Younger visualists tend to have been attracted to the artform through work or study in film and TV, or a love of electronic music and culture. These people (like myself) may know that DMX exists, but have no real experience with the protocol, or the gear it controls.

So when artificialeyes demoed the VMS system for Peter and I at ByteMeFest in Perth last year, I was struck by how simple this step into the lighting world could be. Todd and Michael were using off-the-shelf VMS projection units and controlling them with a clever little open source USB DMX controller called the uDMX, which includes software to translate midi messages into DMX.

So when it came time to plan for the 2008 album launch tour with Bobby Flynn, my desire to expand the impact of our show (while keeping to an extremely restrictive budget and baggage allowance) put a moving video system right on top of my list of possibilities. In the end we didn’t have the cash to invest in VMS, but taking Peter’s previously tried route of mating an inexpensive Rosco iCue robotic mirror with the projectors we already had in our rig was a simple backup plan. For around AU$1000 each (around $600 in the US), plus a trip to the hardware store, we now have two functional (if currently rather ugly) DMX controllable video moving systems.

Lucifer is a plug-in that does real-time audio slicing and repeats — as in for music. So what is this plug-in, running in Ableton Live as a host (hmm, music again), showing up on Create Digital Motion? Because our friend Momo used its MIDI output capabilities to trigger video — and got an unusual interaction between sound and visual as a result. Now, I’m in the camp that says Ableton Live should stay a music app; there are too many well-developed visual tools that Live would never equal. But this is the exception that proves that point: by thinking in a musical way when triggering visuals, you get a relationship between the two you wouldn’t otherwise. Momo shows us how in the latest VJ Kung Fu tutorial. -PK

If you’re not familiar with Lucifer, it’s a VST/AU plugin for realtime beat-based cutup/repeats of audio. What you’re going to do is route the MIDI from Lucifer out to another program that will do Video cutups. This is useful for more than just video - with the MIDI signals coming out of Lucifer, you can control and trigger and MIDI-capable software and hardware.

We figured out a way to control video using the awesome Lucifer plugin while working on our Karate Kid AV Remix. In response to a few inquiries about just how we made this work, I put together a video tutorial showing how to set up Lucifer to output MIDI.

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

While this particular implementation is specific to the Lucifer plug-in, it’s a thought-provoking approach to doing AV Cutups. You could build a similar method by creating MIDI clips that output common/useful triggering patterns, and trigger those instead of mashing buttons to directly start your videos.

Also, this method involves looking at the MIDI Sync information coming from Live and using that to figure out a proper loop-length for your video. This way, you can use a longish video by simply adjusting the ‘play start’ point rather than cutting your videos down to 8 or 16 proper-length versions.

Hit VJ Kung Fu for the full article.