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.

This video demos Anthony Mattox’s Arduino Synthesizer, a synthesizer built with Arduino board with an interface scripted in Processing.

Details at Mattox’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!

This is the most musical demo I’ve seen of the cheapster DIY Gakken SX-150 synth. 

On the video, I’m using Ableton Live to send midi data to the processing sketch using a Network Midi connection on the Mac. On windows, you should be able to use Midi Yolke to accomplish the same thing. Then, I make sure that the processing sketch receives midi on that same virtual midi connection and sends the data through serial to the arduino. So, depending on your system configuration, you might have to tweak the Processing sketch a little bit to make sure it is reading and writing to the right midi and serial ports.

The flow of data from the sequencer to the synth looks like this:
Ableton Live => Virtual Midi Connection => Processing Sketch => Serial Port  => Arduino => DAC => SX-150

The SX-150 is turning out to be a great platform for hacking and learning on; if you fry your kit, you’re out the equivalent of a couple of pizzas. 

via MrBook

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.

This video, Shapes_2.0, is an audiovisual collabration between OnionLab and musician Alex Gámez, aka Asférico.

Both the sound sequencing and the image production were built with Processing.

Do beautiful eyes make beautiful music?

That’s what Patrick of cappel-nord.de set to find out when he created eyeSequencer. 

He explains how this works:

I wrote a little framework/application in Processing to help me analyse the image. “Scanners”? circulate in the eye and analyse RGB and brightness values. These values are used to create OSC Messages, which then are send to SuperCollider. There I could generate sound, but for this example i decided to send MIDI control messages and notes to Ableton Live.

This is a work in progress and I see much room for improvements. I only spend about one hour for the SuperCollider/Ableton Live part, so this could sound a lot nicer

via califaudio

Here’s another amazing music video from Flight404, Relentless, The REV.

Flight404’s Robert Hodgin explains:

The following video is a test render from The REV content creation tool. Please note this is not an official Relentless video. This is simply a test render we did to make sure the audio responsiveness was as we liked it. The audio is by The Flashbulb (”Six Months Without Light” off the album Kirlian Selections) but be aware that The Flashbulb has no affiliation with Relentless. The chosen audio was simply a test track. I chose The Flashbulb because he is my favorite artist to audio visualize and I love this track.

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

Glenn Marshall’s Metamorphosis is programmed entirely in Processing.

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

Phlock is an interactive installation that allows viewers to sequence sounds and create music using the emergent behavior of digital creatures.

More:
http://5cameron.com/dt/?q=node/84

Video from the Chelsea Art Museum May 28, 2008

via camb416

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

Check out this amazing video from Robert Hodgin, made with Processing, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.

I’m blown away – awesome stuff!

If you’re doing anything with Processing and music, let me know in the comments.