Future wave was a sound visualisation projection work which focused on challenging the different possibilities for different style electronic music in one performance. My objective was to cooperate with a local electronic music group organisation called I/O by combining multiple style sound visualisations under one week in China. This project provided an opportunity for me to learn about Touchdesigner, which is an interactive node based visual program, and worked with different sound artists in the real-time immersive performance.
I created more than three different version sound visualisation for six sound artists in the concert. Each visual and audio style was matched toward to enhance the synaesthesia experience for audiences.
EAU is an indietronica band who lived in France. Their music sounds like a combination of Trip-hop and Ambient pop style. Also, it can be referred to a peace version of some French sound artists, like Air and Telepopmusik. And they played modular synthesiser as a live performance in this concert. Base on the idea of the 2D spectrogram, the different zone showed the change of high -frequency to low-frequency sound from the middle to the left and right on the screen. The colour was an idea related to Aurora, multiple colour's traces dances in front of people, bring calm and peace to the audiences, which correspondences with their music style.
ZHI and Tim are two DJs who are enthusiastic about Techno music. They prepared a full Techno set list for the concert. The idea for their visual identity was the "metal liquid" which can express the cold and dark feeling of techno music. By applying 3D spectrogram geometry with metal texture made by Substance designer, I created a metal sound wave for their performance.
Kuki is a famous minimal techno sound artist who can handle multiple styles music and make smooth transition among one performance. It is hard to predict what kind of music he would play in the next song, which is a challenge for visual design. The very original sound wave is not only can match with different style music but also create strong empathy to the audience. The two separate sound waves showed the static and dynamic movements of music which are located in up and down the side of the screen respectively. They moved toward to the middle and separated each other by the boundary, built the relationship between contrast and harmony of the music.
TinTin and Pink played a live set of techno music by recomposing classical Rock N Roll music. I took part in their live set visual design which including multiple 3D objects and PBR materials.
The biggest challenge of this project is the short learning curve of software with high expectations of visual performance in a short time. To make the performance works on time, I created a tight schedule and time boxing for each different visual effects. The lessons I learnt were required more rehearsal time with sound artists and prepared more time to debug in the venue, which can avoid the more accidents happened. Moreover, the optimisation is significant to improve the frame rate and increase the real time performance.
Software: Touchdesigner, Substance Designer.