While on the subject of hacking animation into music tools and audiovisual performance, here’s about as far out as you can get:

What you’re seeing is actually the user interface for Renoise, an app in a category of music tools called “trackers”, being animated directly. The little characters you’re seeing light up are events in the sequence, so as the sequence plays, so does the animation. (What you’re hearing as the musical background in the video is essentially unrelated, I’m guessing, but it’s nonetheless a wild idea.)

Seems a fitting way to celebrate the latest upgrade to Renoise and its arrival on Linux. making it tri-platform. (Very 2008 thing to be.)

By dodgyrecordings, who has some other good stuff; this entry is from a Beat Battle competition.

See dodgyrecordings.com for more.

Squarely in the “things Ableton Live was not necessarily built to do”: animating visuals, one frame at a time.

Cousin Throckmorton whipped up a retro visual feast of Space Invaders, Pong, and other games classics, using MIDI to step through frames individually.

You can MIDI sequence Live’s locators to jump between frames, thereby giving the effect of animation. Sprites/frames are drawn using blank MIDI clips; unfortunately, the resolution is limited by the Y-axis size, as Live doesn’t allow you to resize that. Live’s skins are somewhat tied to MIDI already, so you can “ride” the skins field to change background colors (it updates on midi notes on(?) Audio track is made of samples of video games, trails effect at end achieved via hacked Live skin. Sets/skins available for you to toy with at my myspace: myspace.com/cousinthrockmorton

Mind you, this is unlikely to shake the visualists on Create Digital Motion from specialized tools for visuals — and you could just as easily (uh, scratch that for far more easily) use MIDI to trigger a visual app. But the work is really incredible, and I think as Live grows in ubiquity, users will increasingly show their Live chops by hacking harder than ever before.

And for the record, this is the same Throckmorton who gave us a ribbon controller made from a drivers’ license, a drum made from a laser, and pennies as drum pads, among others. More MIDI-as-visual-control tips, too:

db3ll Channel

Prescient spam comment: “i am so lonely, i just broke up with my ex” says cutechick90201. Worry not, uh, imaginary cutechick. You’ll be surrounded by boys as you seduce them with the siren song of your drivers’ license.

Thanks, Cousin!

Free tools like Quartz Composer (Mac) and Processing (cross-platform) now make it possible to run visuals and music on the same computer. Accelerated on the 3D graphics card in your machine (or integrated graphics on the new MacBooks), you can run live visuals without taxing your CPU, and use MIDI and/or audio signal to translate sound and music into interactive animation.

Translation: you jam, eye candy runs in the background. On the Mac, you can even easily assemble whole sets of songs using Rax with Quartz Composer visualizations, as seen here previously.

I’ll be teaching a workshop on some of these basic techniques and interactive animation and video/image processing in general. The workshop will be here in Brooklyn later this month, and I’d like to invite Create Digital Music readers in the area. We’ll focus on Quartz Composer because it’s quite easy to learn, but the techniques will be applicable to other software on both Mac and Windows. The fact that QC integrates so nicely with Rax should make this especially interesting to musicians wanting to add live visuals.

The class runs August 24 through September 12 at 3rd Ward, the Brooklyn studio space and gallery recently featured in the Bushwick Art Projects event. (See a video at Cool Hunting.) Unfortunately, space in New York always costs money to rent and 3rd Ward is a for-profit space, but I can offer a discount:

Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion readers will get a special discount off membership or workshops in the space:

Enter code PK0806 to receive a 10% discount on a 3-month trial membership or 1 free workshop at 3rd Ward. 3rd Ward is a 20,000 sq. ft. workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals, located in East Williamsburg.

Digital Media Classes @ 3rd Ward
More on the class and the discount/membership from Create Digital Motion

If we don’t get enough people registered, we’ll have to cancel, so please forward to anyone interested. Thanks!

Tired of looking at knobs with labels like “oscillator” and “filter”? Wish you could build an “ultimate instrument” that did what you want? Normally, we’d give you practical ideas like building it in Max/MSP or Reaktor or Pd, but you could also just go and make an imaginary instrument in an animated video:

The Ultimate Instrument [Vimeo]

I’m already thinking about how I could build a working version in Flash. Via CDM’s coolhunter, Afro, on the forums.

Old, but worth mentioning . . . if for no other reason that you’re thinking about color in new ways as you stare into your green beer for St. Patrick’s Day. (Or even a green river, a la Chicago.)

The Music Animation Machine renders familiar music as series of colored bars, in still image or animated video, reminiscent of a piano roll editor in a sequencing application. Color represents harmonic area, so as you look at the piece you see form, structure, shape, and harmony in new ways.

It certainly raises some interesting questions: with new tools at our disposal, what might be a more useful (or visually exciting) way of looking at music? With interactive tools, you could even play with the resulting renderings in real-time. I’m sure I can come up with a really compelling idea if I drink enough green ale. Or, at least, I’ll start to think it’s really compelling.

Pictured: Bach Brandenberg No. 6, mvmt. 3.

The day after I do a VJ roundup, my friend Holly Daggers has turned VJing into a graphic novel. It’s wetcircuits presents VJ comix, a Flash-animated color comic book about the on-the-road life of a superstar VJ. Busta Rhymes, Miri Ben Ari, and All Mighty Senators are featured, plus a tour of unknown origin by a cigarette company of unknown origin (mmm, shady). But what we care about, of course, is Holly’s gear, from Korg, Edirol, et al.

Enjoy!
Of course, the real reason I bring this up is I’d love to get some help making music-themed comics using plasq’s superb Comic Life. Any takers?

Tokyoplastic’s Flash animations have won them widespread acclaim, including a Sundance Online award for their film drummachine. Their animation is hip, sexy, and centers around fabulous sound design with dramatic musical cues. Don’t miss the drum machine in particular — because nothing can compare with watching someone use their head as a mallet. To find it, you’ll have to do a little site navigation: click ‘enter tokyoplastic’ for the Flash site and then prepare to watch the user interface try to crawl away from you. Just be patient: find drummachine or poke around other bits of the site. So the interface elements have legs, literally. It’s worth the wait. Now if only we could convince them to turn it into a plugin version.

Of course, tokyoplastic doesn’t get the original credit for turning some creatures’ heads into drums. That goes to the character Marvin Suggs and his Amazing Muppephone. (Ah, the silky sounds of “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow” . . . you had to see it.) Apparently Marvin and the Muppephones even made a recent appearance as an action figure.

Anyway, rip those piezo sensors out of an old drum machine, tape them to your head, and bang it against things — hard. Instant drum trigger. Connect it via MIDI, and you’re set! Let us know how it goes, if you can still focus on your computer screen.

Music videos with actual live video? That’s so expired. Wired: using Flash to create interactive visuals to listen to while you play a track. That’s exactly what our tech-savvy friends in Boston band Freezepop have done (the same folks who I noted have a PlayStation version of themselves and jam live with their PS2s:

Fancy Ultra*Fresh

Kind of makes you want a hip, anime version of yourself, doesn’t it? The good news about Flash, by the way, is that the Macromedia - Adobe merger isn’t likely to threaten Flash — it’s probably why Adobe bought Macromedia in the first place, as Macworld’s Philip Michaels muses. That’s a good thing, though I sure wish there were one killer interactive app: I’m a musician, and I have to deal with Max/MSP, Flash, Director, Processing, Quartz Composer, etc., etc., all with slightly overlapping — but never complete — feature sets.

Er, anyway — hire a starving Flash artist and your band can look cool. Unless there’s a starving Flash artist already in your band, the probability of which is surprisingly high.