The Fairlight CMI, the ground-breaking digital synth created by Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, is well known for its contribution to music. Think names like Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush, Bono, and … hang on, I’ll stop before this becomes a very long list. With tablet input and sophisticated sampling capabilities, the CMI holds up reasonably well against even modern tech, even if it cost as much as a luxury car. (See Keyboard Magazine’s 2006 write-up.)

But less known is the CMI’s influential visual sibling, the CVI — Computer Video Instrument. Introduced to the market in 1984 at around US$6500, the CVI also used a tablet interface, accessing not a hybrid analog/digital design for visual effects and digital painting in real-time.

You may not know the name, but you’ve seen the effects — the ubiquity of the CVI’s distinctive effects, unfortunately, also made it a cliche in 80s design. But the idea of making an integrating visual instrument is still meaningful today.

It’s not really worth reading about the CVI. It’s better to watch it. We’ve been following videos uploaded by co-creator Vogel onto YouTube, as well as from aficionados of the hardware from the VJ community, on our video sister, Create Digital Motion:

State of the 80s: Fairlight CVI Demo Video, BBC on "Tomorrow’s World"

Video: Fairlight CVI Video Instrument Development, Ca. 1984

Glitch, Synthetic and Real: Free Vintage Fairlight VJ Clips, Glitch in Jitter

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!

Early on here at Create Digital Music, I discovered that many of you share an interest in visuals as well as music, in VJing, real-time visual performance, interactive art, 3D, video and film, and motion graphics. It’s hard to cover those topics adequately on a music site, though, and even though many of us do both, it’s worth treating these areas as the individual disciplines they are. At long last, I’m proud to announce we can now take the wraps off Create Digital Music’s new sister site:

Create Digital Motion

Architecture mixed with electronics mixed with animation — we think nothing of mixing these elements now. In 1958, as Poème Electronique was unleashed on the Brussels World’s Fair, it was still experimental. The animation/installation/composition was the collaborative creation of legendary modernist architect Le Corbusier, his assistant Iannis Xenakis, who would later come to be known as a ground-breaking experimental composer, and composer Edgard Varèse. Varèse is certainly one of us: part of the reason he went into a compositional drought for many years was he was frustrated by the limitations of acoustic sound, and longed for the electronic labs we have today.

The results are, well, totally bizarre, even now. (Or, perhaps, especially now.) There’s a certain freshness, though, to the oddness of the work. I wonder what the ultimate Poème of the 21st Century could look like. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet.

Via Rhizome, via Screenhead — thanks to Marisa Olson, as I’ve been hoping this would crop up online for a long time!

More info on the work, with links, at the Electronic Music Foundation.

Updated: The old YouTube link wasn’t working; here’s a new one. If that doesn’t work, try a YouTube search for Poeme Electronique.

Quartz Composer is a fantastic tool for interactive visuals, and it’s free with Mac OS X (you’ll need to install the developer tools). With MIDI and audio inputs, you can hook custom visuals up to your musical performance. But the program has some limitations: mapping MIDI is generally slow and arduous because of limited MIDI input tools, and there’s no easy way to line up a set of visuals and move through them over the course of a performance.

That’s where plasq’s Rax 2.0 comes in. As we saw earlier this week, Rax lets you build set lists for performance, with different software instruments and effects loaded for each song. Here’s the cool bit: Rax also lets you load Quartz Composer visuals. Since you can load different visuals for each song, you can use Rax to easily switch between QC compositions. (In fact, if visuals are what you really care about, Rax could even be thought of as a MIDI and audio-savvy VJ hosting application.)

Despite advanced musical capabilities, very little music software is written with stage performance in mind. plasq, the folks behind the free looper Musolomo and best known for their wildly-popular Comic Life app, have taken the lightweight Mac music host Rax and transformed it into a super-host on steroids, packed with features for live performance:

1. Set Lists and Performance: Rax was always an easy and useful way of hosting AU plug-in effects and instruments, with full control for MIDI and audio routing. But you probably don’t have the same setup in every song. Rax lets you set up a series of songs as a set for a stage performance. This is clearly essential for bands and live performers, but I’ll bet even many electronica-oriented artists and DJs will find it useful. There’s also no reason you can’t configure useful sets for studio use, too.


2. Front Row for Music: Ever seen Apple’s media app, Front Row? With the new Macs, press a button on the wireless Apple Remote, and your Mac enters a full-screen mode for playing your media files (video, tunes, photos, etc.). Now imagine that idea, applied to music, and you’ll be close to Rax 2’s OnStage mode. A full-screen mode shows your set list in large print, stores notes about each song, monitors MIDI and audio levels, and lets you switch from song to song. It’s all big enough that you can see it from a distance, and so that you don’t have to hover around your QWERTY keyboard, Rax features . . .


3. Remote Control: Use any MIDI controller or even the wireless Apple Remote (if you have a newer Mac) to switch between songs.

Apple has been making a big push to get its developers into OS X’s eye candy, including Quartz 2D and OpenGL 3D graphics. Here are two Mac applications that take advantage of gorgeous UI elements for audio analysis.

In advance of the launch of Create Digital Music’s sister site for interactive visuals and visual performance / VJing, we proudly present, by popular demand:

Create Digital Motion Forums

Note that this forum will be shared with the Create Digital Music forum, because we feel strongly that for many people, these two fields are overlapping in performance. If you’re doing anything visual — be it VJing, video mixing, music videos, visual stuff in Jitter, Processing, and Pd/GEM — now you have a place to talk about it. As always, let us know if you feel there’s a topic we missed or if something isn’t working right for you.

Now, go get those first posts in. (Thanks to Nat as always for his graphic talents.) And stay tuned for the Create Digital Motion launch later this month.

I’m currently testing out my new BCD2000 which I picked up as a visuals controller, mostly for the jog wheels. While better controllers such as this or MsPinky makes scratching pre-produced video more intuitive, using scratches to generate visuals makes me much more excited. Enter the hottest new implementation: V-Scratch.

VScratch allows a visual transcription of every elements used for scratch composition.
It transposes all sound nuances made by the rotation of the record : the variations of speed, audio spectrum and volume.
In addition of the sound aspect (volume and frequences),
the physical act of spinning the record back and forth
is transmitted by an usual optical mouse set on the paper,
in the middle of the record.
All these variables are processed with java language, edited in Processing, according to animate a grid.

Check out the videos, perhaps I’m inured to “normal” video playing forwards and backwards rhythmically, but to me this is the best sound visualization ever (via WMMNA).

Previously: Visual Scratch, Scratching Reality Itself, Pioneer DVJ-X1, Neuromixer Pro

The 3D cards that power games are increasingly enabling new interfaces for music, merging the visual and aural realms. One of the most stunning experiments yet is the Fijuu, which just premiered in its second-generation form as a commission for Cybersonica sound art show in London. (Earlier versions have been seen around since 2004.) Fijuu lets visitors sculpt sound, then record the results on tracks, leaving sonic “footprints” as the sound creator describes them. The interface is entirely controlled by a standard PlayStation 2 controller, as shown in this screen grab.