Of who here who is performing live – what are you doing for visuals?

AudioGus

@u0421793 said:
That’s the thing, it’s a whole task really, not something that can happen ‘on the side’, if done properly.

Hell yah, I can’t even do my day job properly.

Poppadocrock

Not sure if it’s any good but this app is free at the moment.... party projector
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/party-projector/id594090355

AudioGus

@SecretBaseDesign said:
cough, yeah I'm still working, and should have something in the app store in about a week

a clue... here...

Phil999

@u0421793 said:

I’m questioning whether I need to have a “backdrop” behind, with artist in front. I know that’s the traditional and logical way, because the wall behind is usually bigger than the artist, no matter how big the artist. I’m questioning that relationship though.

I'm also questioning that approach, but, as you say, it is somehow logical.

In 2016 I did a performance with a couple of projectors for an improvised music session on a cliff in Ticino. One projector from a laptop running Resolume that could be controlled remotely by iPad2 and Lemur template, one from an iPad Pro with HDMI adapter running VOSC (thank you u0421793 for the tip), and another two with internal SD cards, showing slideshows of dissolving mandalas. It was fantastic. The background was the light grey cliff where the musicians sat on. In later performances we attempted to increase the background surface with a rack and fern leaves. It worked well.

I think it is relevant what background you have. A forest is surprisingly a rather good background. Even small projectors with few luminescence can do wonders in the night. A light grey cliff is grand for projection. The motifs you project get distorted, and incorporate the structure of the rock. I had a plan to do a proper mapping in Resolume, but in the end I just projected planar.

But thinking about it all, I feel that projections in the nature, at night, is somehow wrong. Although that 2016 performance was a great success, as well as the following events. It just doesn't seem right to pollute the nature with light when it is time to sleep. We humans do not depend that much on these circumstances, but insects and animals do very much. With such performances for our own pleasure we deeply disturb the natural environment. That's why I stopped doing such events in nature.

In rooms, in cities, there are no such restrictions. But then we come back to the question you proposed, if one needs a backdrop behind the artist. For this I don't have an answer either. We will see how we can find a solution.

RUST( i )K

@u0421793 said:
If you perform live, no matter what scale, whether a cafe with one table with one customer, or whether it’s a stadium or festival, what are you doing for visuals?

Specifically, what’s the production process and technology?
What’s the authoring process – just running concurrently throwing something visual up there (where?), or with some kind of associated and synchronous meaning linking what’s happening with sound and with vision (like Kraftwerk do with Falk Grieffenhagen).

K MASCHINE
and TAKETE

dafrimpster

For visuals I nod my head. With any luck it is in time with the music. Sometimes I smile during happy songs and lightly scowl during sad songs.

u0421793

@mojozart said:
@u0421793 I like the clip. That would be really fun to see live.

I think you've created a kind of fragmented story in the images, along with colorful graphics that accentuate the music. While I have the sense that the music is in the lead, driving the graphics, my eye is searching for meaning, trying to piece together a story from the images -- which are mostly abstract and not referential. The repetition in the music gives me the sense that I'm seeing reenactments of the same scene, each tantalizingly just beyond comprehension.

Yep, that’s my criticism with it too. I did it as a series of ‘stock’ runs, all danced in time with the track, but not knowing how I’d composite them, and in the end I ran many many layers into a set of about four final composited runs. Then composited those already composited runs in FCPX. However, it shows that I didn’t know how I’d emphasise or build the feeling, everything is ‘stock’ level and doesn’t have any ‘lesser’ or ‘more’ to it. It’s the equivalent of a loudness wars track that is solidly brick-walled all the way through.

The disconnect of ‘doing it’ and then ‘making it’ is the difficulty.

u0421793

@Phil999 said:

@u0421793 said:

I’m questioning whether I need to have a “backdrop” behind, with artist in front. I know that’s the traditional and logical way, because the wall behind is usually bigger than the artist, no matter how big the artist. I’m questioning that relationship though.

I'm also questioning that approach, but, as you say, it is somehow logical.

In 2016 I did a performance with a couple of projectors for an improvised music session on a cliff in Ticino. One projector from a laptop running Resolume that could be controlled remotely by iPad2 and Lemur template, one from an iPad Pro with HDMI adapter running VOSC (thank you u0421793 for the tip), and another two with internal SD cards, showing slideshows of dissolving mandalas. It was fantastic. The background was the light grey cliff where the musicians sat on. In later performances we attempted to increase the background surface with a rack and fern leaves. It worked well.

I think it is relevant what background you have. A forest is surprisingly a rather good background. Even small projectors with few luminescence can do wonders in the night. A light grey cliff is grand for projection. The motifs you project get distorted, and incorporate the structure of the rock. I had a plan to do a proper mapping in Resolume, but in the end I just projected planar.

Sounds very elating, and ‘at peace’ (depending on the music, of course, it wasn’t headbanging death metal glitch or something irksome was it?)

But thinking about it all, I feel that projections in the nature, at night, is somehow wrong. Although that 2016 performance was a great success, as well as the following events. It just doesn't seem right to pollute the nature with light when it is time to sleep. We humans do not depend that much on these circumstances, but insects and animals do very much. With such performances for our own pleasure we deeply disturb the natural environment. That's why I stopped doing such events in nature.

There is that. Unless you’re into moth classification (which a lot of the people I followed on twitter were, so I got to see nightly random moth finds a lot last summer) (Lepidoptera and entomology is a thing I follow).

u0421793

@dafrimpster said:
For visuals I nod my head. With any luck it is in time with the music. Sometimes I smile during happy songs and lightly scowl during sad songs.

Good approach. No expense spent.

u0421793

I liken what needs to be done in many ways to dance. Dancing with flags, if you can imagine that, dancing with light-emitting flags that can change colours. That’s pretty much enough to do the job of interpreting the ‘thing behind the music’, the motives that made the music do what it did. Importantly, I think it’s important not to ‘follow’ the music but follow what made the music’s motifs turn out like that. The emotional intention. It doesn’t have to be exactly in time, either. It’s a lot like dance.

In my college thesis (fuck, that was so long ago, 1980 or 81) (used a typewriter for it, then cut the typed pages up into shards and pasted them back in shattered order) (it was a post-punk ethos, we were all doing it) I noted that the mechanistic following of music might be scientifically correct but to humans doesn’t carry the feeling. Imagine an oscilloscope trace. It’s exactly what the sound is. It doesn’t look like the reason the sounds were made, though. It’s simply a measurement. Not an expression. I think a lot of the sound-to-light things we’ve had since are guilty of the same mechanistic failing.

I’ll tell you one thing though. Back in my computer magazine days I reviewed Jeff Minter’s Trip-A-Tron. I sometimes think I was the only person who totally ‘got’ the purpose of it. I gave it an effusive review of course, it was a deep review (probably full of my theory from the college thesis, I can’t remember). I met Jeff a few times at computer shows and he let me play his wall of Atari STs running a large Trip-A-Tron installation. I really enjoyed that software. In many ways it was a visual clip launcher, but a lot more to it than that. (Jeff’s active now, doing more game stuff, if you want to follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/llamasoft_ox )

Phil999

@u0421793 said:
Sounds very elating, and ‘at peace’ (depending on the music, of course, it wasn’t headbanging death metal glitch or something irksome was it?)

it was a very peaceful night, with very good musicians. Traditional Brasilian chants, with microphones and a small PA. I cannot post video footage because I first have to ask the performers, and I don't want to do that. It was a private session, just for us. Indeed it was elating, for all of us. A friend lit a fire inside a crack of the mountain, the stars were shining, etc.

@u0421793 said:
It doesn’t have to be exactly in time, either. It’s a lot like dance.

that's also my approach. I like to use the microphone signal as an input for Resolume, but in the end I don't use it. Visuals can run independently from the musical content, and can be varied by hand or remote control. It is also great to hand over the controller iPad to spectators to let them do the 'light show'. In general I prefer slow moving visuals without rhythmic content.

auxmux

Yeah, slowing down content helps in my limited experience trying this. It doesn't need to sync but effects and/or glitches can make the mind think it's in time. It's about the feeling, man.

u0421793

On the NYNM minima video I posted earlier, remember this was back in the days of the old iPad2, one of the apps I used (VOSC of course, that’s a given) was Uzu https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/uzu-an-interactive-light-show/id376551723 – I’ve just re-downloaded it, and it’s improved quite a lot. There’s a lot of control beyond the presets, and it uses multitouch quite well, so I ‘played’ it.

u0421793

By the way, I didn’t use this, but it might be fun to play with: Yamaha Visual Performer https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/visual-performer/id539927146

PsyKology

@Max23 said:
We had a girl dancing in leather boots and a whip, punishing her boyfriend. ^^

Almost as good as Stacia who used to perform with Hawkwind.

Phil999

@kitejan said:
On this one I used the app Hyperspektiv quite extensively to mangle the video, and I just ended up filming sections of the film "Metropolis" off youtube, walking around corridors at work, and some of the gadgets I was using for the live performance, with Hyperspektiv, then chopping up the video and assembling the segments using Microsoft Movie Maker (dont laugh: its all I have, and I haven't found anything better and free :-) )

My results are up on youtube here if anyone wants to experience it (minus the pain of using Movie Make for anything like this):

Previously I've used Timelapse and slow motion in my projects - seems to fit the general tone of what I do.

well done, I like the video editing.

Free video editors:
https://www.openshot.org
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve (scroll down to the bottom for download)

Free visuals software:
https://smode.fr

kitejan

@Phil999 said:
well done, I like the video editing.

Free video editors:
https://www.openshot.org
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve (scroll down to the bottom for download)

Free visuals software:
https://smode.fr

Thanks for that - I think I had downloaded the Openshot one before but it didn't work well on my PC for some reason. I will try that again as it looks like the Davinci product requires a spec way above my PC (and possibly my brain as well)

AudioGus

Some neato visuals... (haven't actually listened to the chatter)

mojozart

@AudioGus very ambitious and inspiring work by Refik Anadol; in Seattle we might call him the Chihuly of Big Data

I've been following the experiments of one artist who is using more off-the-shelf processing techniques, such as style transfers. Neat stuff, though still too expensive for live:

AudioGus

@mojozart said:
@AudioGus very ambitious and inspiring work by Refik Anadol; in Seattle we might refer to him as the Chihuly of Big Data

I've been following the experiments of one artist who is using more off-the-shelf processing techniques, such as style transfers. Neat stuff, though still too expensive for live:

Wow at 0:34 Very cool! I could imagine how you could set up a combination or prerendered and realtime to leverage the best of both. If only one could make a living at cool music visuals without having to be a wandering techno hippie doing festivals. (Umm, can you?)

NeuM

@[Deleted User] said:

@Max23 said:

@MonzoPro said:
In my last proper band it was all strobes and oil projectors, man.

Fuck yeah.

That’s beautiful. The oil projectors we had were proper old 60’s ones, never that good though.

@JohnnyGoodyear said:

@MonzoPro said:

@JohnnyGoodyear said:

@MonzoPro said:
In my last proper band it was all strobes and oil projectors, man.

For the last year though I’ve wanted to do gigs with my electronic stuff, and that EboSuite feller has caught my eye. Running all my weird visuals through that via a projector, synced to the music, with maybe some Aphex Twin style live video thrown into the mix, might distract the audiences attention from the horrible racket I’m making.

I think this is perfect and then, with your current condition in mind, I would suggest a highly stylized whalebone corset...

You’re not too big for a slap, Goodyear!! For that you can carry me onto the stage, like a king!

A thousand apologies Effendi....! ....Goodyear wanders off to find his little-used one-man sedan chair thing muttering to himself all the while...

Aside from video the example above, I actually think a bit of dressing up and stage play can be a good thing. An old man standing in front of a laptop, while behind him some of his drawings are projected onto a screen isn’t going to make a great night out for most. Sedan chairs, gorilla costumes, dry ice, dancers in frog outfits, attacking the laptop with daggers, audience participation....that’ll liven things up.

Obviously I’ll go with the laptop and drawings just to annoy people though. Contrary hairy Mary inflicting his bad back vibes on the three people who bothered to turn up.

A band I sometimes used to see live (and who shall remain nameless) would throw live firecrackers at their audience. It was pretty wild.

AlmostAnonymous

@NeuM said:
A band I sometimes used to see live (and who shall remain nameless) would throw live firecrackers at their audience. It was pretty wild.

I often thought of doing this, but with live venomous snakes

TheOriginalPaulB

Hand out cheap kalaidoscopes at the entrance. Job done.

I met Jeff Minter at a computer fair back in the day...

I remember there were stalls promoting various flavours of operating system, MSDOS, QDOS, GDOS, etc... I was momentarily thrown when I turned a corner and encountered a stall for DR. BARNARDOS...

NeuM

@AlmostAnonymous said:

@NeuM said:
A band I sometimes used to see live (and who shall remain nameless) would throw live firecrackers at their audience. It was pretty wild.

I often thought of doing this, but with live venomous snakes

Haha. But seriously, they really did this. I don’t know how they kept getting gigs.