Title
Digital Nostalgia Vol.1: Glitch
Link to the video (No sound):
Link to the audio:
Screenshots:
Project Description
It is an audio-visual performance about my personal understanding of generative music and its visual representation in the form of glitch. My intention is to blend the aesthetics of futurism and nostalgia.
Perspective and Context
I don’t want to superimpose my interpretation of the music piece and map that to the visual, but instead, I want to create a space where the visual elements and the music are responding to one another and open to personal interpretation. Therefore, I narrowed down the main color scheme to the prime colors which creates interesting combinations.
And I divided the visual into five main parameters that can be manipulated: 1) color scheme, 2) color transition of a single scene (gradient or rigid), 3) size distribution of the grid system, 4) the ratio between the horizontal distribution and the vertical distribution of the grid, and 5) the transition between each scene.
Each parameter is controlled by a set of audio output (one oscillator or midi) split by the audio splitter.
(But I changed this after the presentation and made the visual controlled more by the signal generated from the final audio output as a whole, to make the interaction between audio and visual more coherent and relevant.)
In this way, the complexity of the visual speaks about the generative nature of the layers of music. The visual effects and the aesthetics of glitch also resonate with the techno touch of the music. It blends the futurism and nostalgic feelings both in acoustic and visual experience. I can see that in the setting of an electronic music clubbing scene or techno music festival, where it can be better experienced when facilitated by epinephrine.
Development & Technical Implementation
Link to the patcher:
https://gist.github.com/Amber-yutong-lin/cec72c595fbc37bafa48dede8f11a085
Screenshots of the patcher (organized):
Screenshots of the audio production:
I used oscillators to generate the main rhythm and midi for the drum sequence, and I also sampled from a synthesized electronic guitar and human voice to be the undertone of the music. The music itself gave a feeling of “emotionally-neutral,” “timelessness,” and “digital,” which made me think about what is the visual aesthetics of digital can respond to the intuitions I have for the music I created.
Screenshots of the visual production:
After a million times of experimentations, a lot of them are too complex, random and chaotic in terms of color scheme, layout or transitions. However, finally, I settled down with the prime color combination of RGB together with black and white (with other colors appear at intervals for a very small portion on the screen) – they are not very busy but busy enough.
And I added other effects to manipulate the size, proportion, and transitions. Instead of using very rigid transitions, I used more gradient colors and xfader accompanied by pixelation and grid to fuse the fine line between digital and analog, and futurism and nostalgia. Together, they created a glitchy effect that I didn’t expect in the first place but ended up liking it a lot.
Presentation
During the presentation, I received a lot of very constructive feedback and I also observed a lot of amazing handling of the AV interactions from my classmates:
- Make the relevance between audio and visual more visible and on point;
- When the transitions between scenes are too fast, change the speed of the transitions to make it easier on the eyes;
- Create more space to breathe – find a balance between visual abundance and the lack of it, as well as busy audio and silence.
Screenshots:
Therefore, I updated my patcher and did a minor edition on the visuals. I added the Xfader that turns the canvas to black in order to achieve 2) and 3). And made the visual controlled more by the over-all audio signal instead of each oscillator or midi to achieve 1).
Conclusion
In conclusion, I familiarize myself with the workflow and functionalities of Vizzie and beap.
I have some thoughts and critique of my project when reflecting on my process:
- I only used the audio to manipulate the visuals since I began with the audio production and moved to visuals. I would like to experiment with using the visuals to generate the music. And a combination of both as well;
- The unexpected outcome comes from experimentations. When the effects are generated, the design of a mechanism to control them is more thoughtful than the effects themselves;
- Make different volumes of the Digital Nostalgia series for the next step using some iconic visual elements from the Millennium period besides the glitch. Like a lot of the video gaming visuals and aesthetics, or music videos, etc, etc.