moiré (piano and organ) from defetto on Vimeo.
I expect I’m not alone in this: I use to spend time as a kid listening to long records of Beethoven and other stuff I loved, doodling endlessly in a sketchbook. I immediately found stimulation in the challenges of synesthesia: did that squiggle that was so much fun to draw while listening to a phrase really mean anything? Did the art look like chaos, or could I lose myself in the tunes the right way so that somehow I recorded what I was hearing? Later, composing scores and experimenting with graphical notation and struggling to play piano parts for Cage scores, I wondered about the same things in reverse, as a record for musicians.
So, amidst the various experimentation with visual coding tools and reactive visuals, I enjoy experiencing people’s code ideas. Even those sketches that seem to be unsuccessful or incomplete are interesting, because they show potential.
It’s terrific looking through defetto’s Vimeo stream, with lots of synesthetic ideas. It’s a digital take on my old sketchbook, only it’s instantly shared and the music plays along:
http://vimeo.com/defetto/videos
defetto, aka Pedro Mari, has lots of good stuff going. Above, a recent take on Jan Jelinek (Loop-finding-jazz-records) – Moiré (Piano and Organ). See also his photo stream on Flickr and behance portfolio. Other reflections as you’ve tried these sorts of things?
Updated: As noted in comments, the tool in question here is the superb Windows-only, free-for-non-commercial-use vvvv, a visual patching tool for multimedia and real-time visual synthesis. [CDM tag | site] I had Processing on the brain and forgot to make that clear.
If you’ve only been watching passively, have a go with vvvv. Or try Processing 1.0: the download now includes the terrific, stable, and accessible Minim audio library standard.