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.

Cat hit up the Amoeba Dance comments with a link to Sanch TV’s work in vvvv.

Apart from some smooth motion and subtly textured shapes, Sanch is also collaborating on an AV act “Va”, with quad-screen visuals:

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.

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.

Neuromixer Pro 2 on the horizon? Well I guess technically it is, but first we need to tell them what we want from VJ software.

At Neuromixer we are currently developing the most reliable, intuitive and versatile VJ application to date, AVmixer Pro 2. We are taking the existing design and functionality of AVmixer Pro 1.x to the next level by completely re-building the software from the ground up. In order for us to deliver the best product, we would like to ask you a few questions. Your valuable opinion is greatly appreciated.

VJCentral.com is hosting the refreshingly lofi survey. Copy and paste into your email client, mark answers, send, receive your ultimate VJ program in return. Awesome!