Ed. It’s one of the most important live visual inventions of all time — a visual creation on the level of something like the Minimoog for audio synthesis. And it’s now in software form. But just as importantly, there’s a chance to help its inventor complete his vision. -PK

Anton Marini, a.k.a. vade, has released the first public beta of the v002 Rutt/Etra software synthesizer, which is a leap forward in the simulation of the original, badass analog video synthesizer. Anton worked closely with Bill Etra himself, who gave invaluable feedback in the development of the software version. The Mac-only plugin is available now as open source donationware at 002.vade.info with sample compositions for Quartz Composer and VDMX. Ed.: This Mac stuff is all well and good, but I may work with Anton on looking at porting a cross-platform version, as well. And this ought to inspire other ideas in live visual synthesis - an area that has almost limitless frontiers to explore. -PK

Last weekend at a Starbucks in Chinatown, Bill dictated the following statement to me to accompany the release:

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:

I’m sure I’m not the only visualist to have been inspired by Autechre’s Gantz Graf video, nor the only person to have watched it and though “some day, we will be able to do that in realtime”:

I think we’re still quite a way off, but the latest project to set my mind thinking along these lines is Amoeba Dance - Caliper Remote (and the followup, Amoeba Dance with Mad Girls,) by CDMo reader Memo:

This is created realtime in VDMX from a quartz composer generator, controlled by 9-band audio analysis, and topped off with a very nice little effects chain.

A few people have mentioned they don’t get the same look when they use the QTZ file, this is because the QTZ file renders with very basic shading and there is quite a bit of post done in VDMX. The Effects I’m using (from top to bottom) are:
Serpia Tone (100%, Source Atop)
Shaded Material (0-40% tied to audio analysis, Soft Light)
City Lights (100%, Source Atop)
Bloom (100%, Screen)

I’ve also got a 9-band audio analysis going on, with different frequencies driving all the parameters of QTZ. You can just setup the frequencies randomly and it will do pretty cool stuff to almost any song (see http://www.memo.tv/amoeba_dance_v1_5 for an example!!), but it is best to taylor the frequencies to the specific song…

Memo shares the GLSL code and the QTZ file on his site, which contains some interesting nuggets of QC, Actionscript, Processing and other codey goodness. PK: Because this uses GLSL which runs in any OpenGL environment, you could also port the geometry stuff to Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, or (with some adjustments) even things like vvvv, etc. — no need for Quartz Composer per se.

He also maintains a VDMX and Quartz Composer repository: http://vdmx.memo.tv/.

Awesome work, and more to come it seems.

For all of the other CDMo readers who are doing cool things, don’t wait for us to find you: Hit the comments or the contact page and tell us what you’re up to!