Into The Night It Perseveres

This piece is a collaboration between my friend Sam Llanillo and myself, and includes both fixed audio and video media, and live-performed visuals to accompany live saxophone. Sam composed the fixed backing track for the piece–which included a steady drone, rhythmic looped elements, and recorded sax and guitar–and performed live sax over the track during the show. 

My end of our collaboration was the creation, implementation, and live performance of the visual component using TouchDesigner.

The basic structure of the visual part of the piece involved 5 main panels, projection mapped onto the window shades in Stull Hall.

The piece has 4 sections corresponding to changes in the music, and the projections on the panels changed accordingly. To begin, the center panel held a slowly moving noise texture, while the four panels to Sam’s left and right hold mirrored copies of the same image–Sam’s outline, updated with a feedback effect in response to their movement, and pulsing with color in response to the beat of the backing track. To do this, I used an Xbox Kinect calibrated to Stull to track Sam’s motion, and the Kinect’s image data into TouchDesigner. The outlines shift their colors in response to Sam’s performance.