Take control of Ableton Live using your body and a smart phone: free Max for Live devices right here. Check back here for a tutorial on how to set them up, coming next week.
Learn more about my web-based Max for Live class starting in June right here.
I am teaching a web-based class in June about Ableton and Max for Live. All skill levels are welcomed — we are going to turn pictures into sounds, make plug-ins unlike anything you could buy, and hijack Ableton using cameras, Kinects, and smart phones. Hope to see you there.
http://www.tenlegs.com/classes/12/jumpstart-max-for-live
Selected Videos: he lookt thru trees (2010)
Digital psychedelia created by deliberately breaking video files. The videos were original created by taking macro video footage of an old TV screen. They were altered by hand using a hex editor and also by writing a program that made the video change in reaction to the sounds, which were created as a collage in the program Max.
Selected Stills
2010
These images were created using custom software, video feedback, and a digital camera.
Selected Stills: self portrait, nude
2011
Created with the Microsoft Kinect and custom software.
Selected Stills: portraits of my sister in 1989
2011
Selected Stills
2010-2012
These images were created using a mix of sound and video feedback techniques. They were created using custom-built software.
Memory
You are watching a home video my father shot in the mid-80s of my family in the backyard.
Each pixel is shown the way it is stored in computer memory: as a red, green, and blue value stored at a memory address.
If you look straight through the image, the red, green and blue values combine to create the original pixel color.
The Adaptive Production Toolkit
In the future, music production software ought to increasingly include smart tools that take the overwhelming number of options that the digital world provides, and give people more powerful control over them from a higher vantage point. Rather trying to bundle a bunch of knobs together, or drawing automation — both of which limit real-time expressive options — music software needs to look towards ways that a person can delegate the responsibility of making low-level choices to the computer.
In other words, the computer needs to become a collaborator.
One way to do this is with machine learning and artificial intelligence. This video is demonstration of a simple approach using the “intelligence” contained within the sound itself: it shows how using Max for Live, software can analyze an audio signal based on loudness, timbre, or pitch, and then use that information to automatically turn any knob, dial, or fader in Ableton.
Musicians have always been designers of relationships between sounds. This is what that can look like in the contemporary world of music production software.
Map of the Unconscious
March 1st, 2012
