Is this possible with vvvv? (For a guy like me...)

Hello, since many years I am working in live performance. I downloaded vvvv after seeing the work of Natan Sinigaglia. It’s totally mindblowing,

…This moment from minute 1.20:

https://vimeo.com/308776603

Is that actually possible using vvvv? Is it realistic?

I also saw this from Peder Nearby:

https://vimeo.com/284320832

And I wonder if there’s a way to approach this kind of geometry interaction with live audio, without having to become a mathematician and a vvvv expert.

Not much tutorials or info in this forum …

Any help, tips and recommendations would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

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@Rostropovich

That’s a good way to start…

Beyond Sound and Visual
Workshop by Natan Sinigaglia

This workshop is for artists, musicians, creative coders, professionals, students, designers, and whoever is interested in creating audio-visual content using vvvv.

What @Noir said, and you can also have a look at this episode from vvvv-TV where @dottore gives some insights on Mousiké :

Wow! Thanks a lot for the hints.

It’s always a pleasure to join a new community and feel its response
The work of Natan is really superb, so good that there are some stuff to learn from his work.
Really thankful about those links.

What about the video from Peder Nearby? Is it possible to create those complex geometric forms (very like Trapcode TAO AE) and interact with them in real time?

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Yes, I believe that could be done with VL.Stride. Check the Workshop Bundle @Noir mentioned in his post, you’ll find Realtime Graphics with Stride 3D workshop that should teach you the basics of using it.

Hey @sebescudie !

I was taking a look to that “Realtime Graphics…” course, unfortunately it’s really very basic stuff:

Build scenes using primitives and loaded models
Use and creating new materials
Use lights and shadows
Use textures 

That’s the problem I am finding as I get deep in into vvvv … just doing the basic stuff that you can make in 3 minutes in other 3D software takes 2 hours in vvvv

That’s why I am a bit afraid, when it comes to create complex geometries and interactions it will be like a NASA project.

The workshop from Natan Sinigaglia gets much more deep, and it’s going to be really helpful and fun.

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Hi @Rostropovich,

What I might suggest is that you look at something like Notch which is a more high level node-based content creation tool.
Otherwise, it starts this way for everyone. I spend hours looking for ways to tweak skeletons and materials in Blender because I simply don’t know how. But I wouldn’t use blender to do things vvvv is maybe more suited for, but you’d need to find out the crossing points.
Its also worth noting that Dottore spent years figuring out his craft, much of what he develops isn’t built-in. That said you can go a very long way with a good idea of your destination and the libraries and examples you can find in Gamma. So, get philiosphical, it depends upon what kind of guy you are ;-)

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Thanks @Hadasi,

I had already taken a look to Notch, but its aesthetics really freaked me out. I have been working with MaxMSP for many years and I find vvvv much more sexy

Dottore is starting to become someone important in my daily life at this point, so I guess I will have to get philosophical

But after spending weeks and weeks designing Max patches to do simple tasks in my performances, I learned that I have to be careful in getting deep (sinking I would say) in levels and sublevels of patches … I just wanted create a performance piece!

it’s a bit like in life, you can get philosophical and analyze every detail or reaction, but at the end you must proceed, be and live. I need to avoid getting lost in the patches’ dungeons, and I am afraid vvvv can become a very dangerous (and obsessively attractive) new dungeons’ field.

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@Noir

I have been following this great workshop, but when I use the patches,
there are some nodes greyed:
Gist
GetPitchYin

It says “DUMMY Not found…”
And when I hover on it displays the option to “Get it”, but when you try to click it (so frustrating!) it dissapears

How can I install those nodes??

Thanks!

not sure about the GetPitchYin, but the Gist node is now in VL.Audio.GPL which you can install via nuget.

and here is a very simple (too simple?) patch going in the direction of the peder nearby example you posted above. hoping this allows you to take the next steps…
nearby.vl (28.6 KB)

Absolutely possible. We have built something very similar to Mousiké called SpaceMusic. It can do quite a bit more things, but in principle is the same. Generating geometry from live Midi Input. It is not publically available, unfortunately.

There is a video where we explain and show a lot of it from the last NODE festival, you can see me explain and show a bit of it here: https://youtu.be/zAw09yVGJt8?list=PLi8N-UjBVL0d0zNdIxs_QuXnr16QhUqd2&t=19020

Currently we are in the process of porting it to run completely in vvvv gamma.

You dont have to be a mathematician for sure. vvvv expert… well, depends how far you want to go. Currently we are at like iteration 100 and have spent a few thousand hours over the last 7 years on it in total for sure.

But if I can point you in the right direction on something in particular, I am happy to help.

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@seltzdesign Wow, that project looks really appetizing … but this “not publically availalbe” is very … sad …I hope it’s just a matter of time?

As artists, we find ourselves many times digging into complex technical procedures which require a very high specialization. I find this process very thrilling… but many times the tool itself (and its learning curve) becomes a prison, and we loose the first original impulse of communicating and transmitting an idea or concept.

So it would be really beautiful that tools like SpaceMusic would be available at some point. It looks really impressive and promising. Really amazed by your work guys!

I don’t want to expend my next two years trying to learn to produce a geometric rectangle as I play a note of my cello. It’s not laziness, it’s just I know some people will do (or already did) this work better than me.

I hope your project goes well and you can release it at some point.

Thanks for sharing !

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This is my music project. But I am also stage director of Stegreif Ochester in Berlin, and I am always searching for new ways of integrating technology and new languages with music or theater performance.

But as I said, for me it’s very important not to get lost in technical labyrinths (rarely I get it).

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@Rostropovich Thanks for your kind words. It’s been a long time coming, but it started really small. I still remember that first patch in vvvv when we got some midi input and had some simple spheres moving up and down. That was maybe 30 or so nodes. So don’t be afraid to jump in and have a go - it really is quite easy to learn, because trial and error is a valid strategy. It is very logical to follow and you can see the outputs of everything and see how it changes in real-time. You don’t get that luxury with written code, because even just to observe outputs and play around you need to know quite a bit of it. There are also tons of extensions, examples, documentation and of course at least a decades worth of forum posts.

I am very certain that some version of SpaceMusic will be available at some point in 2022. Most likely it will just be a compiled .exe to play around with and not open source. But I mean we are more than happy to share some details on specific things. Right now we still have quite a bit to go. We are just migrating everything to vvvv gamma, so we are rebuilding the whole 3d rendering from scratch. It’s exciting looking at what Stride and Fuse can do.

Really cool stuff that you are doing. I will reach out again once we are a bit further along and we can maybe do a collab in some way. We are actually just looking into ways to support audio input that is translated into midi so it would work better with acoustic instruments.

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