some hopefully helpful ramblings on quartz composer and how I use it for live reinforcement for music.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
hold frames
so lately I've been interested in decay of an image and been struggling with how to hold images from video. conveniently, mac osx's hidden patches chock full of tools that it would otherwise require a lot of coding (beyond my skillset) to get to.
in particular I point to my much sought after "sample and hold" is amongst the private patches, to say nothing of the "replicate in time" function.
I've been impressed with QC's ability to handle fairly intensive processing obligations despite my crappy old processor. Well, I'll have an opportunity for some A/B testing with a fancy new one soon enough. Details will be posted shortly, probably after my upcoming show in Chicago.
I will admit to being frustrated that rendering examples of QC compositions that actually interact with (or at least react to) music is very frustrating without videotaping an actual performance. I wish this were not so.
And by this of course I mean, the following is simply seredipity, which is beautiful in its own right, but sadly mostly just easier than setting up a projector on my wall and playing some music as triggers. This particular clip was part of an explicit experimentation with wide aspect ratios. Soon I gather we'll be able to do multiple displays this way (more easily than now at least) which will keep the projector industry happy ;)
In its real form (as opposed to this fake version) the audio (I use either line in or microphones depending on where I end up in relation to the front of house or monitor boards). Obviously a line in is way better - you can even trigger based on individual mics on stage, or effects sends which is pretty entertaining (to say the least of needing to recalibrate mics based on widely swinging variables from the front of house, etc.) - Anyway, the idea here is to not make it super obvious where the relationship between the audio and the video happens - at least that's how I like to do it. I use clusters of bands from different parts of the spectrum and sum them so that not every time the kick drum is hit (for example) something happens - I will also use logic patches to set up less obvious triggers.
This particular example is fairly limited in the triggers, color shift is the big one, some noise as well. I brightened up this version, it was originally very, very dark on stage - basically no lights on stage when this was happening or you'd never see the eye.
next time I will take the time to set up a video camera to show this properly. sorry.
Here are the two examples of the LFOs I referenced with screenshots below. I'll also make available the .qtz files themselves at some point in the future.
that it's taken me so long to get some examples up. for starters, here's some footage of the beard piece with the LFO running halftone width keyed to snyc with the meter of the music. not the greatest example, but it shows it in some live context. the lowest width on the halftone was set to coincide with the first vocal attack of the meter to emphasize some of the emotion in the lyrics and voice - best example is at 17 seconds I think - that's the part I keyed it to in an earlier verse. this happens to be califone on tour at the bottom of the hill in san francisco. it's very helpful to have the piece being done to a click track or, as the case is here, with excellent drummers with regard to tempo. Califone is very free with their song structure, and will jam for any amount of time, but verse to verse their timing is always tight. Usually I will re-key after any free form/improvised stuff, but showing that requires a much longer clip.
so I've decided to take advantage of the free video hosting of youtube to show examples of what I MEAN when I'm spouting like this. searching for "quartz composer decomposition" should do it nicely.. my user name is aramps. so there.. Similarly, I'll be pointing to those clips in posts from here on out. - feel free to contact me with any questions.
