Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.
Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:
AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live
Gavin writes:
It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.
I’ve written a VST to go in slicer channels tool.
Sync Ableton Live to Isadora using a Pluggo VST from digital funfair on Vimeo.
Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.
The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:
I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer – synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora – same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!
AV Slicer Tutorial – Ableton 7 Slicer with Isadora from digital funfair on Vimeo.
Lots more information at Gavin’s site, Boredbrands Digital Funfair.
He needs someone to build the Mac plug-in, so Max users, if you’re game, go for it!
Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.