03d Research

Geometrical Music – Rui Gato

The topic of this piece is one I have a longstanding personal interest in- geometry.

In this presentation Rui talks through his system which uses Touch Designer as the visual engine and as the algorithmic MIDI note generator and Ableton Live as the audio engine. He controls the system via Lemur OSC app.

What is unique and interesting to me personally about Rui’s approach is that both visuals and sound are triggered by geometries. He explains that the note frequencies are not derived from geometry but that he’d like to achieve that in a future iteration of the system.

The end results are very striking, exposing some of the mathematical bases of the universe in light and sound.

Technical note: In order to generate MIDI in TouchDesigner Rui created a separate TouchDesigner instance running at 480 FPS which he found a high enough process rate to avoid MIDI errors he encountered in the TouchDesigner 60 FPS visual renderer.