Quartz Composer MIDI visualization from Greg Lorincz on Vimeo.

Sometimes the first step is the toughest. So here, in just 60 seconds, is the simplest possible route to visualizing music by routing MIDI into Quartz Composer. For those of you just joining us, that’s the free modular patching environment for visuals that comes with Mac OS X. Here, the example uses Ableton Live, but any music app could work.

Greg Lorincz put together this video, and explains:

This is a simple (very simple) tutorial to visualize MIDI note and control messages from a sequencer (ableton live), in Quartz Composer (Snow Leopard, however it works in the old QC as well). Quartz Composer is a free, developer application for animation, 3D, visualization and graphics.

I do like the idea – maybe we could see what other skills could be demonstrated in 60 seconds. (I can definitely get this rolling in Processing in 60 seconds, but I type fast — and watching someone type code is slightly less interesting.)