Blot (Audiovisual Composition)
2024
This is an audiovisual composition made in Raytone, a node-based audio visual sequencing environment. I was introduced to Raytone by its authors, Eito Murakami and John Burnett and ChucK creator Ge Wang at a Stanford CCRMA summer workshop.
The goal of this project was to create an interactive composition with a number of parameters that a user/performer could control (with sliders in Raytone or MIDI), changing the sound and graphics in real time. There are three instruments in this composition — drums, ‘pluck’, and bass — all synthesized (without the use of audio samples) in ChucK. This use of ChucK code integrated into Raytone allows for more variation in performance, since the alterable parameters affect the creation of the sounds, not just the post processing of them. The graphics, written in GLSL, are meant to be a visual representation of the sounds and their mutation, following a minimal geometric aesthetic that reflects the use of basic waveshapes in the sound synthesis. In total there are twelve alterable parameters, all controlling aspects of the sound, and all but two controlling aspects of the visuals. By adjusting these parameters with intention, one can perform the composition differently each time, with fully synchronized visual accompaniment.
Special thanks to Eito, who helped me devise a system for visualizing a delay effect, and assisted me in coding a weighted moving average algorithm to smooth out parameter changes that sounded choppy.