The Project
Guess who’s back. Just kidding, I won’t make that joke. It just felt like this is the time in the project to get a little silly.
Welcome back to the fifth installment of my solo-music making process. If you are just now joining, I recommend starting at the beginning to see the full unfolding of my process, progress, and sanity. Alright, that one was mostly a joke. To summarize, this is a project for my last course at the University of Arizona, Careers in Music 2. My focus for this set of courses and for my minor is to find ways that I can be a successful and happy musician with a classical music background working in a variety of music fields. I hope to one day help break the stigmas enforced by the academic community surrounding musicians would work in other aspects of music, especially those surrounding the recording and electronic music mediums.
For this project, I am writing, recording, and releasing two songs that will serve as the first installments of my solo music discography. I am rather poor at releasing my own music because so much of my output is focused on commission work or sound design for other music groups that I am working with in other capacities. For instance, this week is tech week for a new opera that I will be a part of premiering this weekend, March 29th and 30th of 2024. Works like that take a considerable amount of time and idea generation, but they can never be released as my own work, for hopefully obvious reasons.
The Art
This week, my project outline was set to decide on a visualizer to use for the video releases of my work. There are a lot of different visualizers available today and there are actually quite a few approaches and techniques for this type of realization. What many probably think of as a “visualizer” is likely a reactive waveform inserted into a video. That is a very simple way to visualize music and show aspects of it through motion. There are quite a few others though. In fact, there is an entire community of individuals who are responsible for some of the best visuals set to music.
Another form that visualization can take is generative video. Generative video is its own genre of art, and video synthesizers (the people not the instruments) take it very seriously. Oftentimes, generative video requires some sort of randomization and/or outside influence upon video parameters other than the music that is accompanying it. This can take several forms, such as midi information from the DAW project changing video parameter values, automated or randomized crossfade between two video input formats, or altering of the RGB values of the video. To synthesize video in this way, you would need a program that is very similar to a DAW to input and output the video and modulation information and properly render the video. For this assignment, I looked at a few like Touch Designer, Resolume, VideoSync, VSynth in Max for Live, and VXSu. All of these are rather “beefy” programs and environments, that could have their own multi-part series written about them.
Now back to the aforementioned, simple reactive waveform generator. These are available in the “beefier” programs, but they are also available for free on webpages as browser-based video renderers. This week, I tried several of them to get a feeling of my options for my final video releases. The below videos are examples of my work set to reactive waveform generators and visual generators by Specterr, Tuneform, and Echowave. For final releases, I will need to select a visualizer and pay for the use of their services to unlock features like variable resolution and removal of the watermarks. Play
The Resistance
Wait, wait, wait. No blog entry is finished without something that went wrong. Well, yes.
Originally, I had planned to learn one of the more complex programs mentioned above. This is a portion of the project that I have been researching and looking forward to for quite some time and I was specifically interested in learning VideoSync or Resolume. In fact, I am rather dissappointed that this post seems like it lands on a simple answer. I am one for theatrics, after all. This week was the week that I found out rather abruptly how difficult these program are to learn. I did look over some basic tutorials for Touch Designer since it is often regarded as the industry standard for this kind of work. I also spoke with a close friend, who is a large member of the video synthesis community in Tucson. He recommended heavily that I try VSynth since I am an Ableton and Max for Live user. Both proved to be too large of a scope for my limited time frame with this project, but I think that I will look into VSynth and Touch Designer in the very near future and utilize them for other releases.
So that’s it. A short and sweet one this week. Make sure to check back next week for two more installments about the final mixing and mastering of my tracks, my plan for release, and the much anticipated name of the project.
The surgeon general’s pop-up shop, Robert Iger’s face
Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles’ take on race
Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war
The whole world at your fingеrtips, the ocean at your door
The livе-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
There it is again
That funny feeling
-Bo Burnham
Griffin Law Music 