"M2" (2020)
Audiovisual / Generated Media / Digital Media
Ephermeral lights and ethereal shapes, transforms into eternity
An interactive audiovisual (April 2020) as the final project for DATT 1000 at York University.
An abstract interactive art piece designed in Max/MSP 8 and Jitter, a sphere of light morphs as the audio evolves, and it emulates both on a macro level signals transmitted across space and on a micro level - particle collisions and fusions. A user interface also allows the user to control aspects of the audiovisual in realtime, including granulator sample length and grain size, as well as light intensity and the main colour.
I started the project in discrete parts before combining them together: an audio module, a visual module, and the user interface. The audio module pulls randomly from a bank of audio samples, and then run the samples through a series of audio effects and modulations, all built from scratch.
The visual module is built using a particle system with dynamically changing gravity and velocities, creating a mesmerizing, ever-shifting storm of bright particles, whose colors are also gradually changes depending on the audio.
Last but not least, the user interface offers a direct means for a user to change visual or audio parameters and see the changes in real time.
Admittedly Max/MSP or Jitter is not the most advanced platforms for animated graphics due to Max stuck with OpenGL 3.0, when the latest stable release was already 4.6 from 2017.
OpenGL has been succeeded by Vulkan, and there are many other more advanced graphical APIs that can really improve the graphics performance in Max, but this was the best we had.
Main UI of "M2" showing all the user-adjustable parameters.
A look at the design of the audio engine, based on Peter Batchelor's Plode Granular Synthesizer
A look at the design of the responsive visual component, based on Federico Foderaro's gl3 GPU Particle System