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:
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:
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.
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***!
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.
In my excitement over the addition of OpenSoundControl (which could just as easily be called OpenVisualControl) to VDMX5, several commenters noted I wasn’t giving props to all the apps that do support OSC. There’s Isadora, for one, a favorite among dancers and VJs (and our friend Momo the Monster), and semi-hidden support in Modul8. Cyberpatrolunit writes:
FYI - the OSC module is free - you can grab it from the ‘Online Library’ in the menu of Modul8
Thanks! Now hook up some weird controllers / music software / another computer, and go play!