In addition to Halloween-themed music mixes to entertain you this weekend, sounds and images from experimental to trance are echoing through the Internets this week. We’ve got the details on Create Digital Motion.

For visualists and a range of out-there-leaning audiovisual and sonic acts, France and the rest of Europe have a festival streaming online:

Festival Stream: French and European Visualists at Cinesthesy 1.0 Today and Saturday

And 11:30p US Eastern is SWiY, with more gear than we have (as pictured above):
Halloween Stream Tonight: SWiY Live Trance and Gearlust

Scare your cat and your significant other and keep the sounds going all weekend, I say. That is, if you’re not roaming America scaring up votes (that’s important, too).

Resolume Avenue 3 Introduction from Bart van der Ploeg on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in audiovisual performance as well as audio, here’s an app to keep an eye on. Resolume “Avenue” 3, announced today, is a ground-up rebuild of a popular VJ app. Now, things like GPU-native video may not mean much to the musical readers of this site. But how about features like this?

• Beat-synced audio triggering alongside video – using the soundtrack inside video clips, or using separate audio files
• VST audio effects, synchronized to visual effects and controls
• MIDI and OpenSoundControl (OSC) support
• Cross-fading of audio and video
• Beat-synced loops

We’ve been playing with an early betas at the live visualist-oriented Create Digital Motion and will have detailed hands-on reports soon. In the meantime, here’s a detailed look at what’s in Resolume Avenue 3:

Resolume “Avenue” 3 Announced: The Audiovisual App to Beat? [Create Digital Motion]

You can see the results above with Missy Elliot, but naturally this could also be used with very different source material as a glitchy audiovisual experimental ambient set, or as a way of triggering videos and audio backing tracks alongside a band.

It’s not without limitations. You can’t yet use VST instruments, so you couldn’t drop a synth or sampler into your visual set and play that – at least not in the first release, due in September.

But it’s clear an audiovisual convergence is happening. You can add this to the recent debut of GrandVJ, a live visual app with a virtual MIDI keyboard in the display and “Synth Mode” for triggering, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the addition of VST effects support in the visual patching environment vvvv. And we’ve likewise seen interesting ways of combining Ableton Live and other music apps with live visuals, as in Momo’s tutorial for A/V cutups with Lucifer.

vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.

• VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
• Multichannel waveplayer
• eCue Lighting Control Support

In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)

I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.

Details:

http://vvvv.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=3&postId=256
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Change+log
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=VST
http://www.ecue.de/products/interfaces/butler.html

vvvv Tag @ createdigitalmotion.com

vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.

From musician Jeremy Linzee and Ethan Vogt comes this lovely fusion of re-cut educational film with music. Ethan and Jeremy work together live, with Ethan recutting the video on the fly. It’s a really terrific way for this filmmaker and musician to work together. Normally we run this sort of thing over on Create Digital Motion, but since it’s by definition a 50/50 collaboration, I thought I’d spread the love and kick off the weekend with a moody reinterpretation of human biology. (Warning: mild, biology-class nudity appears briefly.)

Hopefully we’ll have Jeremy and Ethan together for one of our future events here in New York soon.

Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian Kane (former Emergency Broadcast Network), and Ooah (Glitch Mob).

And then there were the rocks and coconuts. Duncan Laurie and electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been sonifying natural signal sources, hooking up vintage radionics equipment and connecting rocks and bananas and such to signals. Richard and Josh brought along part of their formidable collection of modular equipment, and a great crackling, screaming analog racket resulted.

Fans of vintage gear, big knobs, and audiovisual mayhem will surely be jealous. (Photos above courtesy Todd Thille, Arrow.)

mind-meld.org

Flickr set 

Here’s co-organizer Todd Thille (aka Synesthete) describing the full event.

Mind Meld 2008 – Event Wrap by Todd Thille

Todd writes: The weekend of Friday the 13th marked the 3rd annual Mind Meld gathering at Duncan Laurie’s Jamestown, Rhode Island studio. An incredible assortment of audio and video artists were assembled, ostensibly to relax, but with so much talent in one place, a show or two is inevitable.

CDM has ongoing coverage from the Mutek festival; see more dispatches at events.noisepages.com. Liz talks to A/V duo Rechenzentrum for CDM — and there’s a bit of a revelation at the end of the interview. -Ed.

Rechenzentrum, which means “data processing center” in German, is a Berlin-based duo who create live audio-visual performances by combining austere film visuals with their own brand of minimal techno, fusing elements of jazz, dub, and early industrial. Marc Wieser handles the music half while Lillevan navigates the visual landscape. Their 2003 DVD release Director’s Cut, originally out on Mille Plateaux, went on to win the Ars Electronica prize. Marc and Lillevan sat down with us after their sound check for A/Visions 2 at Mutek 2008.

Liz: What goes on in a live Rechenzentrum performance?

Lillevan: I do the video; Marc does the music. The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much. It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

Marc Weiser: This way it’s improvised, for sure.

CDM’s Peter Dines and Liz McLean Knight (Liz literally on her honeymoon) are keeping us posted with the latest events from Detroit’s Movement and Montreal’s MUTEK festivals. You can keep track of their travels and live impressions on our new CDM events blog, and I look forward to some artist interviews planned with some of our favorite people, coming soon.

So far, Peter is getting his synesthesia on with live audio and visuals at A/Visions, while Liz notes the spooky near-ubiquity of UC-33e controllers running Ableton Live at Movement. (Guess they need to invite us with some odder controllers, huh?)

Lots more coming soon — if you’re at either of these events, too, send in your reports and we’ll publish or link them:

events.noisepages.com

The events site will soon feature more information on CDM-hosted events, as well.

UFO, Black Hawk War from CandyStations on Vimeo.

Jaymis Loveday sits down with Deborah Johnson for Create Digital Motion in a conversation about live visuals for music. Deborah (right), aka CandyStation, is touring with Sufjan Stevens, another of our favorite musicians. (If I could come up with more excuses to bring him into a "digital music" blog, I would.)

It really is a conversation, as Jaymis has plenty of thoughts himself, having toured with Australian Idol Bobby Flynn (and I think the two are kindred in aesthetic).

See Deborah’s visuals above, and check out the full interview on CDMotion:

Interview: Deborah Johnson on Sufjan, Singer Songwriters, and Content

Many artists tour with visuals, but use canned material. Seen any particularly terrific shows with live visuals lately? (Maybe someday we’ll be able to get together a matchmaking service for Create Digital Musicians and Create Digital Motionists — speaking as someone who does do both, it’s not always easy to split energies, and collaboration is more fun!)

Scratching began as a practical means by which DJs could cue records. (So say originators like Grandmaster Flash; if you’re interested in the history, check out the fantastic documentary Scratch — trailer above.) But something about the gesture, the mechanical feeling of scratching, and all that history has made the turntable compelling as a controller. It’s even taught as an instrument at Berklee.

So, what if you want to scratch for purposes other than conventional DJing?

Getting at Timecode

Digital vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE and Native Instruments Traktor Scratch are designed for DJs. Part of the whole advantage is that you get an integrated system with vinyl, decoding capability, audio interfacing with the computer, and software for DJ functions. If you want to take the turntable to other frontiers, you have to find a way to get the timecode data from the vinyl directly and do something different with it, like control an instrument or scratch visuals. (Only recently did a big-name, mainstream DVS, Serato, take on visuals, as seen on Create Digital Motion, and even then it makes some assumptions about what you want to do.)

We’ve seen a few examples of how to do this:

The Fairlight CMI, the ground-breaking digital synth created by Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, is well known for its contribution to music. Think names like Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush, Bono, and … hang on, I’ll stop before this becomes a very long list. With tablet input and sophisticated sampling capabilities, the CMI holds up reasonably well against even modern tech, even if it cost as much as a luxury car. (See Keyboard Magazine’s 2006 write-up.)

But less known is the CMI’s influential visual sibling, the CVI — Computer Video Instrument. Introduced to the market in 1984 at around US$6500, the CVI also used a tablet interface, accessing not a hybrid analog/digital design for visual effects and digital painting in real-time.

You may not know the name, but you’ve seen the effects — the ubiquity of the CVI’s distinctive effects, unfortunately, also made it a cliche in 80s design. But the idea of making an integrating visual instrument is still meaningful today.

It’s not really worth reading about the CVI. It’s better to watch it. We’ve been following videos uploaded by co-creator Vogel onto YouTube, as well as from aficionados of the hardware from the VJ community, on our video sister, Create Digital Motion:

State of the 80s: Fairlight CVI Demo Video, BBC on "Tomorrow’s World"

Video: Fairlight CVI Video Instrument Development, Ca. 1984

Glitch, Synthetic and Real: Free Vintage Fairlight VJ Clips, Glitch in Jitter