06 Research
Touch Designer Research
There is a wealth of content on the internet by artists and designers using Touch Designer for various projects. As I followed up ideas and keywords that emerged during my research process I often found myself at a Touch Designer video. It seems there are many people working in audio visual data processing for art and creative applications who choose this software, indicating that its a good tool for them. Further, there are many talks with artists breaking down their process in detail, and many tutorials and workshops available for free- this would all prove very effective for helping a technical project move forward at a good pace. For these reason I kept considering this tool for my project- it seems a logical choice for its adaptability, connectivity with other sensors and systems, and rapid prototyping.
Further to this it is well suited to live performance, installations, and other multimedia productions. A very useful and capable tool for a digital content designer.
After studying many of the above mentioned videos and articles I followed one for making particles float around a 3D object. I liked the noisy effect which correlates (in my mind) with musical textures and forms- a mixture of noisy textures and symmetrical form. My work can be seen in the following video.
This visualisation has many attributes that have the potential to be linked with an audio system and controlled by users via sensor manipulation.
I experimented with controlling several parameters via MIDI from an app on my iPhone… the initial test results were hopeful- quite usable and in terms of prototyping a good option because iPhones are generally easy to source from friends and family.
I also tried using TDAbleton which is a suite of tools for bidirectional data communication between Ableton and Touch Designer which many people report effectively using for their projects, but in my test Touch Designer crashed every time I loaded the necessary components. I intend to revisit this in the future.
Resources & Links
TouchDesigner YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbgFCfj0vp-nNGQ4hT5uEAg
TouchDesigner Documentation
