Anyone that has been VJ'ing for more than 5 minutes will have at some point or other asked themselves: how do I make this visual fit the music? Regardless of whether you're making full-on AV sets, or banging out the lumens in a club to somebody else's tune, matching the visuals to the music is what stands a VJ apart from a WinAmp visualizer.
Enter Gilbert Sinnott, the man behind Idiron AV. Gilbert spent a lot of time thinking about how to match audio to visuals, and vice versa. In fact he graduated on the subject in his final year of studying Multimedia Design + Tech BSc at Brunel University in 2010. After finishing his studies, he developed this concept into a complete set of tools for creating, syncing and performing with audio and visuals as a unified whole. He called this project Idiron AV, and you can see it in action below.
Gilbert's research took him further than just techniques as audio FFT and midi sync, although of course they feature heavily as well. He also developed concepts regarding what sort of content should be used, and how to best control it.
Best of all, he's not afraid to share with the other kids in the visual playground.
He developed a comprehensive set of Max4Live patches, that allow you to send FFT data from Ableton straight to Resolume via OSC. With these you get some really cool ways of linking FFT and midi data from Ableton to the timeline in Resolume. By an ingenious way of using the dashboard as an intermediary you have plenty of options to configure the sync to your own specific needs as well. To help get you started Gilbert even provides a little tutorial video.
Aside from the Max4Live patches, he's using some custom TouchOSC patches to control the whole performance, which you can also download from his site. So head on over to http://idiron.kaen.org/av for more info, and of course to download these handy tools. Don't forget to check out Gilbert's other music, and to leave a thank you and/or donation while you're there!
