This is old news, but clearing out the feed-reader means finding some forgotten gems. Robert Hodgin of Flight404 fame coded a “beauty engine” (my term) by visualizing a Radiohead track. The entire video is generated by code, with no post processing.
You can watch the low-res video, but after looking at the full-res video there’s just no comparison. Details - and there are many - emerge with the larger video that just got muddied to oblivion with the small vid.
He originally wasn’t going to enter it into the Radiohead video contest, but fans convinced him to try. He says this of his work:
Firstly, its got some mad crazy super duper beat detection going on. I reused the application I wrote to make the Goldfrapp piece but went a few steps further. I manually input each bass beat, snare, highhat, and arpeggio note, not to mention all the vocals and syllable breaks. Crazy! It took about 6 hours but I think it was the right way to do it. I would have wasted much more time than that had I chosen to do the beat detection algorithmically. But man, scrubbing through that track, over and over, marking every note… it was a carpal pain.
Readers will note I’m a huge fan of his work. I’m just fascinated when I watch music being visualized in real-time - like watching painting and music making each other, or at least synthesizing something that didn’t exist before. This is light-years beyond most music visualizers. I’m very interested in the concept of building a system - the creativity is on the front-end, and the system is sort of… unleashed on the music. In this instance, he’s manually mapping tones and beats for the software to pick up on, but the potential exists for realtime input or music analysis to fill in that gap.
Create Digital Motion is always good for some inspirational approaches and good ‘ol DIY video hacks. I’m wanting to learn Quartz Composer - a dynamic video tech that Apple makes - and plug it into ProPresenter for some realtime audio-driven animation under lyrics for worship and other gigs.
Posted in Film & Video, Worship Media
