Case Study: Graphics Generated from Audio
The symbolic tone and emotional context of the piece is largely up to individual interpretation, perhaps guided by certain underlying parts of the design; selecting the footage used and composing the audio dually conveys both the abstract, meditative nature of the ‘final frontier,’ alongside common feelings of fearing the unknown, and a sense of fearsome, inconceivable awe as well. Our two tracks, “Echoes” and “Orbit” were designed to showcase these general ideas respectively, with the overall goal being to highlight this dichotomy and have each school of thought shown consistently the entire time.
Technology
Max For Live
Timeline
2 Months
Role
Video Producer
Date Completed
November 2021
The setup consisted of three projector screens, two of which were assembled while the other was mounted from the wall. While there were some initial concerns over this complicated set design, we were all confident that it would help add to the 2 feelings of immersion as well. There were two synth tracks that had been composed outside of the Max environment, using a website called Audiotool, and had various melodic and/or dissonant keyboard notes played on top of them, all of which were sent back and forth with “udpsend” “udpreceive” commands, and controlled through a MIDI Mix controller. From there, each of the screens had a version of the same format, with two rotating spheres (planets), and the camera centered on top of the larger one, looking at the other as what might’ve been an orbiting moon or some other stellar neighbor. And finally, the background of each of the screens was either an incandescent starfield or a black void, either way signifying the depth of space, interlaced with one video looping behind the planets on each of the screens- the three video clips were a shimmering, pulsating nebula, wafting plumes of smoke, and a giant, flamelike mass of particles shooting all across the screen. The mounted screen at the back of the demonstration also had another looping video of Earth along with the other two spheres as well. All of these moving parts were then tied together in a satisfying, intriguing, and unified performance, with the rotation of all of the planets in perfect sync, a cacophony of generated white noise used for seamlessly transitioning between the two songs, and each of the animated video components shifting colors based off the volume intensity of each respective track.
Joe Goodacre 