My TouchDesigner Tokyo / MUTEK.jp Talk Is Live! Behind the Scenes of My Audiovisual Practice

Hey Everyone!

I'm very excited to share the talk I did for the TouchDesigner Japan event back in November. I was recovering from entirely losing my voice the night before, so please excuse how I sound!

In this talk, I go behind the scenes of several audiovisual projects and performances I was working on at the time, sharing both some of the technical techniques and the ideas that were shaping how I approached audio-reactive visuals.

I walk through a GPU-based wavetable synth I had been experimenting with, where image processing is used to directly generate and manipulate audio.

Things like changing image resolution, quantizing pixels, and blurring the image create corresponding changes in pitch, bitcrushing, and filtering. That experiment changed the way I think about creating audio reactive visuals and game me a much more tangible way of thinking about the relationship between visual and audio effects.

I also break down how I've been getting extremely low-latency audio from in DAWs like Ableton and Bitwig into TouchDesigner for audio-reactive visuals, including the routing and buffer settings I've been using. Lately I've also been using Darrien Brito's Aether VST which has worked really well!

I share two audiovisual pieces from that period, including a performance with Dan Gorelick where I performed the visuals and Dan performed music and live-coded audio:

and an audiovisual installation originally shown at Video Città in Rome.

Looking back, this talk feels like a interesting snapshot for me. At the time, I hadn't yet started making the music for my own audiovisual performances. I was still exploring these ideas through visual systems, installations, and collaborations. What feels especially meaningful now is that those two pieces I shared in the talk ended up becoming core parts of my own audiovisual performance. This feels like a moment where a lot of the ideas around sound, image, and performance were starting to come together.

Thanks again for all your support! I've got some new motion tracking tools in the works right now that I'm excited to share soon and also workign on an edit of the Yolo plugin tutorial.

Tools for Improvisation - Torin Blankensmith (USA) (YouTube)