I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming shows to reach those fans.
Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.
This time tomorrow (6PM AEST, 8AM GMT, 3AM New York), I’ll be streaming live with AV turntablist Sampology from the Game Over party at the State Library of Queensland.
Video-SL is fantastic fun, and as a visualist it’s somewhat humbling to discover what a turntable worrier can do when their spinning plastic discs suddenly have power over vision as well as sound. Tune in tomorrow to see.
To sweeten the deal, we’ll be preceeded on stage by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) and Matt and Yug (of Australian Gamer), who will have a screening of their show Game Damage, and then talk about games rather a lot.
Peter and I have been talking about running CDM-curated streaming events for a while, as a way for us to bring together artists from the incredible communities which have coalesced around this little corner of the web. A series of innocent discussions with Jean Poole last time I was in Melbourne seems to have been turned into somewhat of a juggernaut: Net-Lag.
Tomorrow, Thursday October 9th from 8PM-1AM (Australian Eastern Standard Time), as part of the Melbourne Digital Fringe, Melbourne’s fantastic Horse Bazaar projection bar will play virtual host to a globe-spanning lineup of artists in the inaugural Net-Lag: Vapour Trails.
Along with artists from Melbourne, Perth and the LightRhythmVisuals crew in Tokyo, Peter will be playing a breakfast AV set at 9AM New York time (1AM AEST), and I’ll be bringing collaborators Segue into the studio along with a dozen video cameras joined together with the groundbreaking Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer.
The event will be broadcast using the Mogulus live streaming production platform (at mogulus.com/netlag/), which allows streams from multiple sources to be combined with overlays, live chat, twitter streams etc. It’s a very capable system, and it will be interesting to see how it stands up to the rigors of a multi-continent audiovisualist show. For for set times and lineup details, check out the Net-Lag site.
After spending much of last year traveling thousands of kilometers around Australia in a rock band, I’ve been idealizing web streaming as an alternative to traditional touring. The response to the recent Wesen live streaming session was fantastic, and if this goes well we’ll definitely be looking at putting together future CDM-centric events. If you’d be interested in taking part in future streams hit the comments, and join the fun tomorrow night.
If you’re interested in audiovisual performance as well as audio, here’s an app to keep an eye on. Resolume “Avenue” 3, announced today, is a ground-up rebuild of a popular VJ app. Now, things like GPU-native video may not mean much to the musical readers of this site. But how about features like this?
Beat-synced audio triggering alongside video – using the soundtrack inside video clips, or using separate audio files
VST audio effects, synchronized to visual effects and controls
MIDI and OpenSoundControl (OSC) support
Cross-fading of audio and video
Beat-synced loops
We’ve been playing with an early betas at the live visualist-oriented Create Digital Motion and will have detailed hands-on reports soon. In the meantime, here’s a detailed look at what’s in Resolume Avenue 3:
You can see the results above with Missy Elliot, but naturally this could also be used with very different source material as a glitchy audiovisual experimental ambient set, or as a way of triggering videos and audio backing tracks alongside a band.
It’s not without limitations. You can’t yet use VST instruments, so you couldn’t drop a synth or sampler into your visual set and play that – at least not in the first release, due in September.
But it’s clear an audiovisual convergence is happening. You can add this to the recent debut of GrandVJ, a live visual app with a virtual MIDI keyboard in the display and “Synth Mode” for triggering, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the addition of VST effects support in the visual patching environment vvvv. And we’ve likewise seen interesting ways of combining Ableton Live and other music apps with live visuals, as in Momo’s tutorial for A/V cutups with Lucifer.
vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.
VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
Multichannel waveplayer
eCue Lighting Control Support
In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)
I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.
vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.
6
