Visually-enhanced Musical Instruments

[nosuchtim]

There's a continuum of instruments from purely musical instruments (the most common) to purely visual instruments (e.g. liquid light shows). Along that continuum, an instrument that is purely musical can be enhanced with visuals that directly reflect and support some recognizable aspect of the music. It's not unusual to see a small number of audio frequency bands controlling visuals, but those give limited control to the person playing the musical instrument. On the other hand, if you use the actual MIDI data of the music (assuming we're in MIDI land), pitch and channel can be used in much more interesting ways, providing more detailed control to the instrument and player. I find Dan Tepfer's work inspirational in thinking about how visuals can be used in this way. In his presentations, he gradually introduces people to musical concepts and then interesting visualizations of them. Here's a point in a recent video where you can see what he does:

https://youtu.be/D56G1HYbPt0?t=3522

Shortly after that simple example, he shows a handful of other interesting realtime graphical representations of music which are easily understandable by an audience. It's the realtime aspect of this stuff which particularly attracts me, because while only directly playing the music, the performer can see and interact with the resulting visuals by improvising musically.

...Tim...