Adventures in Sound

The VRU is assisting Birmingham Conservatoire in staging Luca Francesconi's "Lips, Eyes, Bang", which features live and pre-recorded performances and interactive video. We're specifically working on getting some iSight cameras around the space streaming into Max/MSP/Jitter for performer feedback and live video processing. Some of the stuff looks like old pop videos (largely reminiscent of the cromakeying in the 'Ashes to Ashes' promo). Greg remarks that the thing about new technology is that it generally reminds you of old technology, and he has a point, though I think that's more to do with the observer rather than the technology itself. As usual, we've got some cruder (ie. more reliable) solutions on hand for the camera feed, and that's what we go for in the end; the streaming solution seems like overkill, though we'll definitely use it in the future. Right now the important thing is to have the performer see herself in both untreated and treated form ('Before' and 'After'), and Max/MSP seems to allow us to do that in no time at all. It's back on our list of software purchases for the VRU (it's been on and off it at least twice now as our specs change), which gives us a neat complement to our expanding set of midi input/processing components. I'd like to see this stuff using Core Video in Tiger, especially as Qurtz Composer has a MIDI input module. That's another experiment though, for another time.