audio/visual performance…
I have been searching for various ways to incorporate visuals into my performances for many years. My best results have come from collaborations, sometimes by complete random chance, with visualists, or VJs. Some of my favorites are Dr. Mojo (his work is unreal), and Permian Stratta, both of whom I met by performing at the Warper Party in New York.
I also enjoyed working with Hil Dar (Hilary Khrishnan) while in Intra Faction. She mapped all the video into three triangle projection shapes using Mad Mapper. We had a wireless system where I was sending her midi messages through a “max hole” in Max software and we used Jitter to generate video. It was pretty seemless, really fun and a wireless situation.
I wanted to try and do something similar for myself because I have an old macbook pro with Max 7 on it. After failing at creating a secure wireless network between the two computers, largely due to updates in Mac OS where they abandoned that feature, I realized I couldn’t adopt that method.
By the way, making your work and methods future proof is very important. Mac OS, Ableton and Max are always making lots of updates. I couldn’t believe Apple abandoned the possibility of creating a wireless network. Maybe it is dangerous, or can be used to commit some kind of terrorist act. But as a person who performs in rooms where everyone has a cell phone it is important to have a secure network.
Visuals
Because I was going to need to use one computer for everything I decided not to use Jitter, the video component of Max, because I thought it might cause latency in the audio and stuttering, slow video if the computer needed to generate both audio and video simultaneously.
I ultimately decided to use Processing, a free, open source software that can generate video, animations and a lot more. It doesn’t use much CPU and has very little latency. I have been able to send messages from my instruments into Max, then into Processing. Processing is a code based language based on Javascript. I mostly learned what I know from watching a ton of videos on the YouTube Coding Train channel. Daniel Schiffman and his videos are so amazing and informative. I can almost watch them for entertainment. One commentor noted that if you turn the audio off in a Daniel Schiffman video it almost looks like he is rapping, because of all his crazy hand gestures and animated way of speaking. Anyway, this is the best way to learn Processing in my humble opinion.
During my last tour, I was incorporating visuals into all my performances for the last week, and I could feel how powerful this imagery is, how much it engages the audience and how it started to influence the music I was creating.
In my first efforts in creating visuals I was mostly concerned with marrying sound and image, and not spending too much time on what the images are. But as I developed some skills and tools in Processing I became more drawn towards sacred geometry, and tableaux that meant something to me. I could definitely sense the power of these images when accompanied with sound.
Videos from tour
I am still developing a vocabulary, a voice, and figuring out how to express myself in Processing. The images in this post are created from a new animation I am working on. For now I want to embed some videos from the last week of my tour in Oct/Nov that show positive results with the interaction between sound / image. This is something that I will definitely be utilizing more going forward. I will also post some more videos as I start to edit the footage I recorded.
This is one of my earliest efforts using Max and Processing, from a show at Coaxial Arts in Los Angeles, Sept 2019. As you can see it’s mostly just rectangles moving in sync with rhythms.