This is the latest sneak preview for Glenn Marshall’s Zio – an interactive generative psychedelic visualizer:

Presently you can change most of the branching and shading and can easily navigate with dragging/pinch zoom and rotate.  You can pause the animation at any time and still interact/move around, and also save pictures to your photo library.

The interface is just a temporary one at the minute for testing, it will be redesigned and probably have twice as much features seen in the demo – including particle motion and trails and the ability to tweak the underlying math and algorithms.

This demo is a screen cap of the iPhone simulator – at times the frame-rate is jerky – but actually runs okay on the real device! (don’t know why that should be).

Zio is still in developement and Marshall is looking into various options for letting the iPhone access audio, so that the visuals may be able to react to music.

If Marshall can get this right, though, Zio could be one of the coolest apps yet for the iPhone.

Here’s a video update from Glenn Marshall of his Zio generative music video application.

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Marshall’s creating an application that creates generative visuals based on elements in the music that you’re listening too, along with your interaction with your iPhone or iPod touch.

Marshall explains:

It’s these concepts, if ‘nailed’, will allow endless generative animation, yet maintaining visual interest, surprise, non repetition, artistic sensibility, spatial and temporal variety, and a subtle sense of narrative and purpose. In short, something which seems alive and creating it’s own world, endlessly.

The music in this demo is my own, and I’m considering ’shipping’ it with the final app when it’s finished, you can of course disable this and play anything from your Ipod.

Also to be added are the interactive features, moving around, zooming in/out, and shaking the phone will randomise the colour scheme and growth features.

No release date has been set for Zio.

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?

Glenn Marshall – The Nest That Sailed The Sky, Computer-generated Visualisation 2009

Glenn Marshall does something that few video artists do – he makes abstract videos, based on generative processes, that are full of beauty and wonder.

His work is almost a visual analogy to Brian Eno’s work with generative music.

This is his video for Peter Gabriel’s The Nest That Sailed The Sky.

Details on Marshall’s video below.

via MediaArtTube:

Glenn Marshall: I developed 6 animation sequences using this imagery, all showing different stages of birth, life, transcendence, decay etc.

1. single cells growing on ends of stems, with dark underwater shading , I also added concentric ripples which emanated from the growing vines.
2. empty nests with trails of red berries being left behind where ever the stems grow from, against subdued morning sky shading.
3. the boy in the nest appears, against sunset shaded background.
4. boy in nest against brighter blue sky shading.
5. star child luminous effect on dark background.
6. single cells again, without stems, dark watery shading.

I rendered out each sequence for the entirety of the songs duration. The shapes of the vines and positions of the sprites are exact for each sequence, this allowed me to dissolve each sequence at any point from one into another and maintain a natural looking transition. In post production, through simple dissolves, I could experiment with and craft together a visual narrative that changed with musical cues in the song.

First demo video of computer artist Glenn Marshall’s ‘graphic synthesiser’, or the G-synth, as it’s now called:

This is  a culmination of a years self-teaching and exploration of programming using the Processing language.

It’s a tool and instrument for myself as a digital artist, which will hopefully keep my work fresh and innovative, and inspire others to teach themselves programming to build their own artistic technology.

Details at Glenn Marshall’s site.

This is a music video by Glenn Marshall for Peter Gabriel’s The Nest That Sailed The Sky.

“I was asked to develop the ’story’ further, and got some visual ideas from looking through photos from the original OVO album shoot,” says Marshall. “I got three extra visual ideas from this – single cells, an empty nest, trails of red berries.”

Marshall’s work is very abstract but is also very sensual in its use of shapes and color. You can see more of his work at his Vimeo site.

Let me know what you think!

Version 1.0 of Processing, an application for creating audio and visual work, has launched.

Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well. 

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

I’ve included an example of a music video created with Processing above, Glenn Marshall’s video for Radiohead’s Bodysnatching. 

Processing is a free download, for Linux, OS X and Windows. 

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios. 

• At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year. 
•  At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.
• At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes. 

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects. 

• Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard. 
• Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos. 
• Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing. 
• The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki. 
• The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project. 
• The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research. 

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux.

Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats.

Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

I’m a fan of Glenn Marshall’s music videos and his latest video shows why. 

It’s a generative video exploration of Radiohead’s Bodysnatchers, from In Rainbows. 

Here’s how Marshall explains how the audio is interacting with the generative video:

1. Bass guitar – makes the red shading on the red zeno pulsate.
2. Lead guitar – affects intensity of inner glows of both zenos.
3. Treble – affects size of sprites.
4. Vocal – additional affector to red sprite size, affects speed and directions of all sprites, affects size of stars in background.
5. X Factor – this is the name I gave to the overall amplitude – an ‘excitement’ factor. This controls the camera Z depth (near/far) – loudness brings us closer in, quieter breaks bring us out again. This was important to get that sense of a non-static journey and spatial interest that married with the music. The X Factor also increases the speed of the zenos growing, and the intensity of the blue cloud.

Audio analysis is an art in itself, finding whats interesting, isolating cleanly from everything else, and hooking it up with the visuals somehow.  You can see there are endless variables and permutations to play with, which makes it a fascinating form of audio visual art, especially when mixed in with generative animation.

Glenn Marshall’s second video for Peter Gabriel, based on a recursive, repeating pattern technique developed in After Effects. The song is a remix of the more commercial single Steam. 

Marshall took images out of the original video and remixed the video as the audio had been remixed.. 
What I thought was unique is that both the song and the video were remixed into a completely new piece.

“What I thought was unique is that both the song and the video were remixed into a completely new piece,” says Marshall.

Recent videos by Glenn Marshall for electronica groups have turned us into fans – but this older video, for Peter Gabriel’s The Drop – is just as interesting:

This was my first music video, for Peter Gabriel, made in 2003. 

About 2 months to make, I paid special attention to the lyrics, and how imagery and motion would cue up on certain words and phrases.

I also developed further my fascination with choreographed, complex moving patterns, using the same techniques in Butterfly, which involved attaching sprites/images to particle systems. 

Marshall also tells a great story about how this video came to be at his site.

This is another gorgeous Glenn Marshall video – a short animated guide to Buddhist breath meditation, using the metaphor of an opening lotus.

The narration was adapted from a talk given by Ajahn Brahm, a popular Buddhist teacher, author and abbot of Serpentine monastery, Perth.

Glenn Marshall’s Metamorphosis is programmed entirely in Processing.

The music is Boards of Canada’s Corsair from the Geogaddi album.

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?

Glenn Marshall’s video for the Boards of Canada track, Music Is Math.

An animation created with Processing, which is being used by more and more people to create generative animations for music videos.

via Califaudio