Music to Moving Colours

[hyperborea]

Hi KVR guys/girls

For a future project I am looking for the best program to turn our electronic music into abstract moving images. In the old days it was called 'light-organ' but now there should be a lot more possible.

Please give me some pointers, thanks.

Greetz,
Madeleine

[allofdrab]

Hi KVR guys/girls

For a future project I am looking for the best program to turn our electronic music into abstract moving images. In the old days it was called 'light-organ' but now there should be a lot more possible.

Please give me some pointers, thanks.

Greetz,
Madeleine

Mac, Windows, or Linux?

I use Quartz Composer on a Mac for this sort of thing.
Pretty easy to get interesting results.
Quartz Composer is one of the developer tools that comes with OSX.
https://developer.apple.com/technologie ... ation.html
http://quartzcomposer.com/

For Windows I recommend checking out vvvv.
http://vvvv.org/
Also great.

[hyperborea]

A allofdrap.

Thanks for the info. I will check it out today. Sorry that I didn't mention it was for a Windows PC. Really appreciate your help.

Have a good day,
Madeleine

[allofdrab]

Hey Madeleine;
no problem.

I enjoy working with sound and visuals.
You do have many other options.
I was just posting suggestions based on what I have experience with.
There are of course apps you could use that involve text-based coding; like processing.
http://www.processing.org/
However, I'm not sure what your level of experience is with text-based coding.
Mine is a bit limited, but I'm working on it - mostly in another Mac app called Impromptu.

Another quite popular tool for making sound driven and/or interactive visuals is Jitter, which was designed to work with Max/MSP (a classic modular sound design environment), but you'll have to pay for that.
http://cycling74.com/products/max/video-jitter/
http://cycling74.com/products/max/3d-graphics/

On the other hand an open-source alternative to Max/MSP that is VERY similar is Pure Data (or Pd for short), which also has extensions for creating visuals that are tied to sound manipulation.
http://puredata.info/
I don't have a ton of experience using Pd for making visuals, but it's cross-platform, and I do have it installed on my Mac, so I could potentially help you out with it.
Pd also has sizeable user-base, and so you may get the assistance you'd like in a Pd Forum or mailing-list.
http://puredata.info/community

vvvv (and Quartz Composer) have higher level modules you can visually wire together to make things.
vvvv is also a VST plugin host which can be a benefit.
I usually control colour, images, shapes, etc... with MIDI info coming from another app (Bidule in my case), or with piped in audio (also coming from Bidule); that I take the real-time spectral or amplitude info from and use to control colours and movement of images, shapes, etc....
It's quite easy in Quartz Composer, but I did spend some time with vvvv back in my Windows days, and so may be able to help you using it.
Actually, I've been sort of waiting for a reason to run Windows in Parallels on my Mac, so I may just get it running this weekend.

I really loved vvvv, and am a bit curious if I can bridge it with the audio work I'm doing in OSX.
Anywho, feel free to let me know how you're making out, and ask me any questions.
I may not have all the answers, but would be happy to figure out solutions with you.

David

[allofdrab]

On a side note, I was watching this the other day, and thought you may find it interesting (I did).
Randy Jones is/was one of the main developers of Jitter.


This is a bit of a nut bar (and rather looooong) spectral to colour thing I did a while back using Quartz Composer a Shruti Box, a synced gate, and an iPad looper. Should be rather simple to replicate something like this using vvvv.

[hyperborea]

@ allofdrap

Thanks for your suggestions and I will look into them over the weekend. I am really not much of a programmer, but who knows whats around the next corner.

Thanks again and have a great weekend,
Madeleine