Beatesthesia Custom Visulizer from olly gore on Vimeo.

Beatesthesia is a new open-source, cross-platform VJing/music visualizer application programmed in Processing. It sports some interesting design decisions, including an audio-reactive user interface. Its an interesting idea, and is certainly pretty and definitely novel. At first glance, I didn’t like the blinking UI; it struck me as being far too distracting, but, after second thought, it’s a pretty decent way of conveying content and disambiguating a UI elements purpose. Well done. Check out the Vimeo video and home page to get a feel for its capabilities.

Beatesthesia strikes me as being more of a music visualizer than a fully featured VJ application, but it’s open source, which means it will grow as it pulls in a dedicated user base. Beatesthesia’s website also hosts shared projects, so you can explore other users visualizations. [Ed. For what it's worth, it looks like more than just a visualizer to me -- especially as you start to edit the ways in which it works and make more elements "performable" -- and if you don't like this specific implementation, you could certainly code your own in Processing! Anyone performing with this or building something similar, let us know. -PK]

video mlr clone demo from themoves on Vimeo.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of using the Monome, the popular open-source, button-bestrewn controller device, for visuals and not just sound. But I haven’t seen any examples in person. Via comments on Monday’s Live + Isadora story, here’s one example by Joshua Nugent. The software is inspired by MLR, the sound sample-rocking patch that comes with Monome. In fact, that’s one area in which I think the Monome hasn’t gotten enough credit — a lot of its popularity actually comes from its software design, not just its elegantly-minimal hardware design.

I tend to do visuals differently, so I’ll have to finish my kit, finally, and post some software examples. And yes, while this is done in Isadora, there’s nothing saying you couldn’t use other software tools.

Bonus points for including Bush dancing in Africa. Now someone send poor Josh a screen and some windowblinds.

More on this project on the Monome forums, including instructions:

how about a video version of MLR/64step?

I’d love to see more Monome examples, so if you’ve got them, send them in!

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.

Guitar Hero? We want VJ Hero. And the AV Arcade Table, now part of the Boredbrands Digital Funfair, is exactly what you’d want it to be like.

It’s got the hardware — a DIY, cocktail-style arcade table, just the like the one you spent playing Ms. Pac-Man on, slightly drunk.

It’s got the software — a Windows PC running VJAMM.

And it’s got the content — Guitar Hero and Rock Band have rock classics, so this has some classic clips from VJs.

Official description:

The AV Arcade Table is a simple hybrid, a table top arcade cabinet that has been converted to run Vjamm, the best Audio Visual VJ Software by miles! Using the joystick and buttons 2 people can trigger audio visual samples and create beautiful collaborative audio visual collage/ a chaotic mess** (delete as appropriate!).

The Table was originally created for Cybersonica 2007 and was featured as part of “Soundwaves” at Kinetica Museum

Thanks to Eclectic Method, Exceeda, Hexstatic and Vjamm All Stars for supplying content.

AV Arcade Table @ Boredbrands Digital Funfair

Incidentally, reasons to give some props to VJAMM, even in this overcrowded world of VJ apps, and even though everyone went out and bought MacBook Pros last week, it seems:

• Coldcut uses VJAMM. I mean, celebrity matters little to us here, but they do use it well, and that counts.
• The Novation SL line of keyboards supports Automap in VJAMM. (It’s England, so I’m guessing that idea got worked out over a pint — which is certainly the way I like to make deals.)
• They have this cheery slogan on their website: “VJamm3 is the world’s leading audiovisual instrument, the ultimate tool for sound and image mixing, the true 21st century artform, the new hip-hop.”
• This table

Thanks to Gav for the tip — great work, mate! And to all readers of CDM: go for the shameless plugs. There’s no shame in it. We love to see the cool stuff you’re doing.

Beeple - iv.7 (annoyingly small mix) on Vimeo

Beeple’s Audiovisual exploits have been featured twice on Create Digital Motion, and raised a variety of questions. Momo the Monster cornered Mike Winkelmann in a dark alley and forced him to give us the information you crave.

What can you tell us about your method?

Well, usually I write the basis for a song using loop-based software like FL Studio, then i take and export all of those loops and make video that syncs precisely to each note in the loop. If it’s a melody line, then I will try to make it so that you can discern the different notes that are being played. If it is a more rhythmic or atonal sound,I will try to make some piece of video that “looks” like that sound. Then I render the loops of music and video together into one video file. Next, I take those video files into a NLE (I use Vegas 4, mostly) and attempt to write a large piece using my audio/video loops. I layer all of the pieces of audio/video, and because they are all individually synced, bits of my piece, the end product kind of makes itself in terms of video.

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.

For those of you who didn’t make the awesome CDM Party last Friday night after NAMM, I’m pleased to bring you a recording of the live AV Remix that I performed with Acid&Bass.

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Performed live at the Unofficial NAMM After-Party using 3 MIDI-synced machines:

Video Machine:
Operated by Momo the Monster
Software: Isadora (custom patch for show)
Hardware: MacBook Pro, Monome 128, UC-33e, E-MU 0404

Audio 1:
Operated by Shane Hazelton
Software: Max/MSP With custom software IMPS (Improvisational Media Performance System), Lucifer
Hardware: Receptor VST plugin Player with Zounds of VSTs, Novation Remote 25, BCR 2000

Audio 2:
Operated by Stephan Vankov
Software: Ableton Live, Lucifer Plug-in (sending MIDI to Video Station)
Hardware: Mac, BCR2000, MPD16, Remote25LE, AirFX, NuVJ

Artist Caveats: This version was cut from the original 25+minute length to a more internet-friendly 7-1/2 minutes. Also, this is version one of the performance - we rehearsed only twice before this show, this is really our first run-through with everything (mostly) working. Comments welcome as we continue to develop the idea.

Karate Kid live remixing music performance from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Emergency Broadcast Network have released their ground-breaking audiovisual album Telecommunications Breakdown online for the first time. As Jonny says on the AV blog at videomix.es:

The release was original mainly CD Audio only at the time as general release formats didn’t allow for an AV album. All the visuals were made at the same time, basically the the visuals is the music and here for the first time is all the video album in one place::::::

Skip to 3:19 for a truly brilliant mashup moment, which appears at 3:27. Then watch it from the beginning. I can only imagine how difficult this was to create using the technology available in 1995.