This is an example of gorgeous psychedelic generative video from flight404:

I have been working on a real-time version of the Solar piece from a couple years ago. Since it is going to be responding to people’s voices and ambient noise instead of music, I started listening to podcasts while I was developing it.

I made this video to commemorate my new found love for WNYC’s RadioLab podcast. Thanks to Branden Hall and Bill Lindmeier for introducing me to it.

I’d like to see this on some music!

This is a teaser trailer for Glenn Marshall’s iPhone music visualization application, Zio.

Marshall is known to Synthtopia readers for his amazing generative music videos.

About Zio, Marshall says:

I would say I’m at the half way stage now, and after doubting almost daily the project and my ability to realise it, for the first time I feel confident that I can actually pull this off and come up with something half decent on the iPhone.

The direction I’m taking for my first app will be based on the ‘Music is Math’ animation style, semi-abstract, in black and white – roots and vines growing endlessly in real-time. It will be interactive, respond to touch,orientation etc, have randomising features and maybe a few other tricks.

The demo runs smoothly at 24 fps, it can run a lot faster, but I need headroom to implement the rest of the visuals to be added – to be included next will be the shading/shadow algoritms (more bitmaps), the sprites/particles flying around through a perlin noise field, and also I can hopefully have a duplicate layer of the growing vines in the background, as is common in all my videos to date using this system.

Marshall adds:

I want to create something enigmatic, sublime. Like my mum said when I showed it to her, it’s peaceful to watch, like an aquarium… which is a very good comparison.

Marshall’s work reminds me of fractals, in the way that they seem to offer infinite detail as you look closer, and of Brian Eno’s music, in the way he creates controlled processes to create something beautiful.

Let me know what you think of Glenn Marshall’s Zio. Can you see using something like this as a visualizer to accompany live electronic music?

For 200 Nanowebbers, Semiconductor created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor’s live soundtrack:

Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. Layers of energetic hand drawn animations, play over the simplest of vector shapes that form atomic scale associations. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances. 

Jan van Nuenen’s Flowers is an interesting experimental electronic music video that explores the idea of using the Monome to control audio and video generation at the same time. 

Here’s how it works:

The home made Monome is connected to a max/msp patch called boiingg (great app for the monome).

Max sends midi to Ableton <ive, triggering some Operator synths and…

Live generates a string of midinotes with velocity 0 to 20 and back to 0. The velocity channel is used to tell the game engine which frame of the loop will be displayed. In this case, a loop of a growing flower is playing from frame 0 to 20 and back. So you can re-animate the flower by changing the velocities. Framerate can be changed by changing bpm in live. This technique also allows you to change in and out points of the loop live. 

This string of midinotes is send to the NuPlay midi client, which sends it to the right object trigger inside the game engine.

More details at Nuenen’s site. 

via Oliver Chesler

Another audio-generated landscape music video from Flight404.

Videos like this make me think we’re on the cusp of a new era of audio visual psychedelic media; this time, it’s going to be HD, interactive and real-time. 

 ”I made the following demo because I wanted an easy way to showcase what Processing can handle in real-time,” says creator Robert Hodgin. 

Details on how the video was made at Hodgin’s blog, flight404.

Tokyo-based d.v.d is a trio with two drum players, Itoken and Jimanica and visualiser Takashi Yamaguchi (ymg) on the hardware front.

While the two drummers furiously beat two drum kits in front of a huge screen, their sounds trigger geometrical shapes with processing, Pong-style game settings or bizarre drop landscapes that interact, transform or collapse. 

Jimanica explains how it works:

An audio generating computer and a second one that generates the visuals exchange signals through LAN using OSC. The tracks are played with max/msp. The drum sets are attached with a sensor called trigger and that transmits the vibration of the drums as signals to the midi interface. Those signals are then converted into midi note numbers. That midi data is then sent to the visual PC and creates the actions in the animations generated by processing software.

Basically, we as the two drummers perform on top of an audio track and sometimes we follow the score depending on the tracks. The tracks all have set duration so we never improvise the ending sounds and patterns — we just have a grasp of the finishing point from the composition and the monitor. Sometimes we add sound effects by hitting the drums during the tracks so that’s why you can hear all kinds of organic sounds as well.

Details at pingmag. Via picdit

This if the final version of Glenn Marshall’s video Music Is Math.

It’s a generative video, and Marshall says “I just let the program run till the end of the music, I felt reluctant to interfere too much by trying to sculpt an ending, and just let the code run its own natural course.”

Nevertheless – it’s interesting how your brain creates connections between the visuals and the music, isn’t it?

This video from Zonkout demonstrates a self-generating modular synthesizer (Blacet+Modcan) patch with camera-less video feedback, performed live.

via Matrix

This cool video, Sound Reactive Boids In A Flowsphere, by Rui Madeira, uses generative video software to create an abstract take on Aphex Twin:

audio reative visuals made in c++ using the amazing openframeworks library

Song -> aphex twin – 4

i used a perlin noise class which can be found here :
flipcode.com/archives/Perlin_Noise_Class.shtml

and some of this is still adapted from a robert hodgin source which can be found here flight404.com/blog/?p=113

The generative approach to video works great with a lot of electronica, and this is no exception.

If you’ve seen any other cool generative electronic music videos, let me know in the comments.

via Califaudio

Robert Hodgin put together this stunning generative music video for Radiohead’s video contest, but realized that the result didn’t have that much to do with Radiohead.

It’s very cool, just the same.