Music • Sound • Video • Art

Live for Video...?

…and I can’t tell you how excited I am by this.

Resolume Avenue 3 is a “VJ” app although I think it has really outgrown that label. Resolume brings the immediacy of Live to working with both visual and audio materials seamlessly. And given that Resolume works with both MIDI and OSC in this version, and Live8 is now extensible via MAX for Live in some very low level ways, I can’t wait to see what others more skilled than I am come up with. To me, this is the first step one of the strongest steps in the true integration of music and visual technology into a performance and eventual music/audio writing and composition tool..

Given my interests, I want to explore this app for producing material that is not as club oriented, so I’d like to see what it does with audio material with less defined transients or more complex rhythmic structures than your basic “4 on the floor”. Maybe I’ll try combining this in my current uber-review project using the Live8 beta, SynPlant, and the “5 way path” challenge material from Daevl.

Yeh, what the hell? It’s not like life isn’t already complicated….

Peace.  :-)

Yet another Voice of Passion?

A couple of days ago I came across information on a small outfit called Tonehammer. From their site:

Tonehammer is owned by Academy Award Winning Composer, Troels Folmann and TEC Award Winning Sound Designer, Mike Peaslee. Tonehammer is specialized in creating unique- and powerful virtual instruments for feature, tv- and video games composers.

In particular I came across their latest product Forgotten Voices: Francesca. It’s damn good.

I don’t want to recreate information you can find on their site. Suffice to say that it’s a female vocal library of phrases arranged in categories that have names like Slow Chanting, Playful Chanting, Flute Singing, Lullaby, Powerful/Forte, Slow/Dark, etc. By adjusting the mod-wheel and pitch bend you can control sample start points and time-stretch/compress the phrases. There is also a bonus set of vocal ambiences that for me cinched the deal. Overall, the programming is quite evocative and usable and I really like those ambiances quite a bit.

According to Tonehammer:

The combination between sample off-set control and time-stretch/compression allows users to seamlessly morph different phrases together, which brings endless possibilities for creating new phrases.

Perhaps in theory. In practice, well, it takes practice to make the above happen. From the “happy mistakes” I made this weekend, I think there is promise.

I have to explore it more, but a poor man’s version of Quantum Leap’s Voices of Passion comes to mind. Not nearly as exhaustive (it’s just $89 afterall), but in a similar “Gladiator-soundtrackesque” vein. I have not tried using the two together yet, but am hopeful that Francesca will prove a worthy addition.

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…what you would like to see more of on subnoto::indico. There is a quick poll at the top of the far right column of the page. Takes like 5 seconds to let me know if any of those things interest you. If you want to suggest something different, leave a comment and let me know what that is…

Thanks all!