luc.fm

8.field is an immersive light and sound environment by Luc Bokor-Smith.  It is comprised of over 3,000 individually-addressable RGB LEDs and four speakers, which are driven by a generative audiovisual system composed in Max/MSP.

The light and color data are spilled out from Jitter matrices within Max, and output via the Art-Net DMX protocol to an ENTTEC Pixelator.  The audio environment is primarily comprised of additive synthesis, filtered noise, and gated low-frequency sine tones, and is designed for quadraphonic systems.

When composing, Bokor-Smith drew inspiration from films of the 1980s, along with the work of artists such as Dan Flavin and Jenny Holzer.  8.field premiered at Brown University in Providence, RI from March 19-23 2018, where it was presented in part by the Brown Arts Initiative.
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premiere: march 19 - 23, 2018 // granoff center for the creative arts // providence, ri

@luc.fm 

video by louis wei; photos by kei kinoshita.

8.field is a light and sound environment by luc bokor-smith. it is comprised of over 3,000 individually-addressable RGB LEDs and four speake

8-field-installation-for-light-sound-and-code

8.field - installation for light, sound, and code

James Elliott

This tool hosts Afterglow, a free, open-source live-coding environment for creating light shows using any interface compatible with the Open Lighting Architecture, entirely inside Max. It allows Max patchers to control the lighting cues, including adjusting their parameters as each frame of lighting control information is generated, so you can do things like using audio analysis or vizzie to create effects on a huge lighting grid.

The tool page describes the Max objects that the package offers, and explains how to install the Open Lighting Architecture. The afterglow-max package includes Help patchers and Reference pages to help you get your bearings, but you will also want to explore Afterglow's own extensive documentation.

In addition to being designed to allow you to inject your own code right into the frame rendering process, there are other ways that Afterglow differs from other lighting control software you may have worked with. The early stages of its rendering loop can work with higher levels of abstraction than the typical DMX channel value or fixture function (although those are well supported too):

You can express your desired results in terms of an abstract color, including support for the hue-saturation-lightness model, which is great for algorithmic looks, and have it translated to whatever color channels (or color wheel) your fixture supports.

Groups of moving heads can be told to aim in particular directions by specifying parameterized vectors, or to aim at a particular point in space, and Afterglow figures out how to translate that into DMX control values given its understanding of the fixture and where, and at what angle, you hung it.

There are a variety of oscillators which can efficiently drive effect parameters.

You can also create complex effects, with parameters that can be tweaked by Max, or through a rich binding to an Ableton Push controller.

The timing of effects is pervasively influenced by a deep notion of musical time, with support for synchronization via MIDI clock or Pioneer Pro DJ Link beat grids.


afterglow-max-control-light-shows-max

afterglow-max - Control light shows from Max

Sam Tarakajian

Perfume New Album 「LEVEL3」
2013.10.2 release

Perfume Official Site
http://www.perfume-web.jp/

Perfume NEW ALBUM 「LEVEL3」 (Teaser)

By way of the very talented Daito Manabe it’s come to our attention that Mira has been spotted in the wild. It has made its way across the Pacific and into a nonspeaking role in a teaser video released to promote a single by the Japanese pop supergroup Perfume.

Cycling ’74 did not pay for this product placement, but we are thrilled to be associated in some small way with this production. As you can see over Daito's shoulder, Mira was used to control lighting on the set during rehearsal and filming.

The final music video, available here does not feature Mira, but it does have some touchscreen-inspired decor that I suppose reflects back on whatever Mira’s imagined role in the production might have been. Oh, and there’s also an extremely catchy song, if we are to judge from the 1.6 million views as of this writing.


mira-caught-behind-the-scenes-of-j-pop

Mira caught behind the scenes of J-Pop

geddonn

All audio transformations and visual analysis was programmed with Max/MSP/Jitter/Gen

ext1

EXT1

David Butler

DMaX is a set of devices for Ableton Live written with Max for Live, that allow DMX lighting to be controlled using Live parameters. This allows the creation of perfectly synchronised lighting effects that can be composed in the same environment as the music.

project68-dmax-dmx-lighting-in-ableton-live

DMaX - DMX Lighting in Ableton Live

Andrew Benson

A visit to Live Design International, 2016

LDI 2016 1

LDI 2016 2

LDI 2016 3

Last week, I was invited by to participate in a panel discussion at Live Design International (LDI) in Las Vegas, the leading conference and trade show for lighting and live design professionals. The panel was called “Design On A Dime”, and despite the name, tended to mainly focus around how people create one-off and custom show designs. Those of you mostly focussed on music might not realize how many theater and stage professionals are sticking Max in the middle of their complex show designs. Joining me on the panel were other artists and lighting designers working with Isadora, Millumin, and Lightjams, as well as a number of other solutions.

A big topic of conversation - and something I realized I wanted to learn more about - was LED pixel mapping. With individually addressable LED strips and tapes now widely available and relatively affordable, lots of people are looking into custom installations and set pieces that include LED lighting effects. Enttec’s E.L.M. software includes supports for Syphon, which means you could develop video effects in Jitter that get passed along to the LEDs without having to do the DMX programming yourself. Some very exciting possibilities there that I’ll be excited to test out in my studio.

Besides that, where LDI really delivers is a show floor full of fog machines, laser projectors, movable head lighting fixtures, projection mapping, and every configuration of LED lights you can imagine. It definitely made me want to dust off Andrew Pask’s DMX articles and dive into some lighting experiments.

on-the-road-live-design-international

On the Road: Live Design International

doctorhandshake

Glasslands is a small, DIY-feeling music venue with no dedicated lighting tech. As such, it was necessary to design a largely autonomous control system for controlling this 300-channel RGB LED lighting system so that their sound techs could select from a 'scenebook' of looks and modify only high-level parameters (lighter/darker, faster/slower, chandeliers or no, monochromatic or more complex color system, more/less saturated, more/less distinction between stage and house, more/less responsive to audio, etc.), freeing them up to run sound let the tubes run themselves.

The software has two primary elements to its GUI: 

1) a low-level window in which users use modular number generators (constant values, LFOs, audio analysis, MIDI, or OSC) to modify basic parameters of how color is drawn onto the floorplan of the venue

2) a higher-level window in which users can modify mapping ranges and toggle venue-specific settings

The system is designed so that the sound operator can, at any time, load a 'scene' of 8 'looks' through which the system will randomly walk at a pace determined in part by the user and in part by musical analysis. The operator can also, at any time, 'lock' any parameter or mapping setting such that the preset system cannot override that particular setting.

This way, the sound guy could come in and say 'OK it's a singer-songwriter tonight, so I'm gonna call up scene 21, which has some mellow looks. I'm also gonna turn on the center chandelier (over center stage), and lock it on to keep attention there. I'm gonna dim the house and lock that. I'm gonna restrict it to the blue range and lock that. I'm gonna keep the lights pretty dim and lock that. The rest I'll let the system run.' 

Or maybe, 'It's a dance party so I'm gonna let the color range be wide, turn off the chandeliers (let them be controlled by other color generators), make the stage and the house act as one space, and lock all that in. For the rest I'll call up scene 31 because that has some good dynamic dance-party looks.'

Everything in this software is built in Max, MSP, and Jitter. It draws color to slabs in GL space with a custom gradient shader. It uses the built-in preset system to store and recall looks. It uses some custom audio analysis (built in MSP) and custom color picking from matrix space (built in Jitter).

Due to the zig-zagging, haphazard, fail-early-and-often dev process, it would have been nearly impossible to do this project in another environment. 

Thanks to the folks on the forums (Vade) as well as Jake Rosenthal, Rami Haykal, Jason Fellows, Eileen Tang, Trevor Hufnagel, Joshua Thiel, Cameron Hull, Rochelle Fafone, Noam Foxtongue, Alan Yaspan, Francisco J Casablanca, Guillermo Echevarria, Chuck Ludwig, and anybody else I forgot in the credits.

glasslands-tubes

Glasslands: Tubes

naaman

the entire project is based on the custom max app that translate midi commands from

Apc40 into OSC commands used by Mpc software and M-Series lighting consoles by Martin

apc2mpc

PereVicalet

I use Max in All in one for controlling all incoming data from Synapse, to modify Ableton Live parameters and also for creating video processing with Jitter into Ableton Live as a new device corresponding with the color of the lights. Then, I can synchronize the lights on blue, and video output data also in blue changing with the music in realtime. 

all-in-one-kinect-video-music-lighting-jockey-kivimulij

All in one: Kinect Video Music Lighting Jockey - Kivimulij

Andrew Pask

In this 2nd article in my Working with Hardware series on DMX programming in Max, I’d like to present a couple of interviews with very experienced Max programmers who are heavily into the field of DMX programming, and also present a list of links to DMX hardware vendors.

All the tutorials in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

David Butler is a Max programmer based in London. If you've been on the forum  asking DMX related questions he’s probably chimed in, and over at his website he’s got a bunch of Max related stuff up, including the DMX tools imp.dmx. He’s a really busy guy, but I recently got a chance to ask him about his current work.

How did you get involved in DMX coding? As in, what are the sort of
productions you find yourself doing DMX coding for?

DB: For one of my Max composition projects at the end of the first year of my degree I was working on a piece with five instrumental performers cued via headphones from a patch. I wanted to use coloured light on each performer, so I bought a USB DMX box and borrowed some basic LED RGB parcans from the theatre I worked in at the time. Once I'd got the hardware, I found a lot of scope for adding lighting as an additional element in other projects I was working on, both in theatre-work and my own compositions. Over the course of my degree I gradually moved away from music composition to more visual-based projects, and I focused in on lighting and show control programming. I found that there was a niche market for programmers who had experience of theatre and event production. By working in Max I can develop multi-platform solutions very quickly, and occasionally 'in the field' (or in a freezing park at 5 in the morning, as happened on a recent job).

I'm interested in convergence and integration for different forms of show control/media playback, so a lot of the projects I work on are concerned with linking together different control systems. My personal philosophy in using Max is that it's pointless to try and recreate existing complex software or hardware, so generally I use it to augment systems to add support for customised hardware, or provide a custom interface for an unusual control situation. Occasionally I build complete integrated systems for projects where buying a full-blown lighting desk would be overkill.

When I first started working with DMX in Max, I found that although there was quite a history of its use on various other projects there weren't really any specialised tools or objects (beyond basic hardware support) for it. My first task was to try and enable Art-Net support in Max. Eventually I found a good cross-platform solution using a Max abstraction and a bit of java code. This has evolved and is now a native Max object with better support for the protocol. I've also made a bunch of abstractions to make integrating DMX into patchers quicker and easier (imp.dmx).

DB: For portable and day-to-day use, I have an Enttec DMX USB Pro, which is probably the best interface there is for someone who wants to experiment with DMX. It's not the absolute cheapest, but it's pretty rock solid, supports full frame rate DMX, is electrically isolated to protect your computer, and can both send and receive DMX. There's an object written by Olaf Matthes to enable support in Max, but I've just written a replacement as I was having compatibility issues with Max 6 when using receive mode.

For more involved projects I also have an Enttec ODE, which is about the cheapest Art-Net to DMX device around, but very reliable and good quality. In an installation situation I'd use this as first preference, as it's completely separate from the computer (having it's own power supply, DMX output won't stop if the computer goes down).

Tell us a little about Art-Net. What's the kind of situation where Art-Net becomes preferable to straight up DMX512?

DB: Art-Net is great because being an Ethernet protocol it's completely hardware agnostic. Therefore you don't have any issues with hardware communication, because all the computer has to do is broadcast Art-Net packets and other devices on the network (fixtures, computers, Art-Net DMX interfaces) will receive them. For anyone who's planning a moderately large project, or can see DMX becoming an essential part of their work, I'd strongly recommend to go down the Art-Net route. It's far more future-proof than a USB solution.

The entertainment control industry is gradually shifting to all-Ethernet based control systems, although it's going to take a few decades before DMX disappears completely. The new protocol (ACN - Architecture for Control Networks) is based around Ethernet, and will allows a much more intelligent form of control (analogous to the difference between MIDI and OSC) than DMX which just constantly sends 8-bit values. No one is really using it yet, but in the distant future it will hopefully replace DMX. In the meantime we have Ethernet-based control protocols like Art-Net which merely replicate DMX. However there are lots of advantages to using Ethernet as the transport:

Cat5/6 Cable is far, far cheaper, and one cable can carry around 40 Art-Net universes at once (one universe is 512 DMX channels, the maximum amount that can be sent down a single DMX cable).

Standard IT networking equipment can be used to route and distribute the signal, which again is far cheaper than specialised DMX routing equipment.

It's far easier to connect computers and other equipment which uses Ethernet, therefore the show network can be used for types of control other than lighting.

However there is a severe problem with using Ethernet for DMX. Standard DMX cable is connected to fixtures in a daisy-chain fashion. On most fixtures the DMX Thru/Out is passively connected to the input, so the signal will pass through even if the fixture loses power. This isn't possible with Ethernet, every fixture must be cabled back to a hub, which although cheaper than DMX splitters/hubs, would still raise the cost of running a lighting control network significantly (not to mention the extra cable costs).

Quite a lot of newer lighting fixtures now have Ethernet ports included, and can receive Art-Net directly, but some can also receive Art-Net and then output the signal as serial DMX, effectively acting as an Art-Net to DMX interface. So the place for Ethernet is in the distribution system leading to each lighting bar, where it can be translated to serial DMX and be daisy-chained between fixtures. In my opinion this will become the norm for large projects in the next 5 years.

What DMX projects are you currently working on?

I've just finished working on NVA's Speed of Light as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2012. This involved wireless DMX transmission to around 120 runners wearing RGB LED light suits out on Arthur's Seat. I'm also working on a personal project involving projection mapping with yoked DMX controlled projectors.

I'm just about to release the newest version of my Ableton Live DMX system called DMaX. This allows linking of DMX control parameters for different kinds of fixtures to Ableton parameters, which can then be automated, modulated, mapped and controlled like any other Ableton parameter. The new version allows up to four universes of fixtures, has a completely redesigned interface, and an easier method for users to create their own fixture modules.

Olaf Matthes is a Max programmer living in the Northern part of Germany. He uses Max for programming but prefers to use Max 4 ( “it does everything I want!”). Olaf has published an external for communication between MaxMSP and Enttec USB DMX devices, you can find it and other Max related stuff over at his website. 

What DMX hardware do you use for your projects?

OM: For non-permanent installations I use the USB DMX Pro box from Enttec. I also have created and sell an external for controlling Enttec USB DMX devices. It is available at my website.

What sort of non permanent exhibitions using DMX have you worked on?

OM: This is a mobile-phone controlled orchestra of household machines. Also check the SALE AWAY videos.

What hardware do you use for your permanent installations?

OM: Because of the 1 ms timing limit in Max and because of problems with long-time stability of USB connected hardware (not just the Enttec box) we switched over to industrial grade hardware from Beckhoff using EtherCAT fieldbus.

I made a Max external for that and the nice thing is since all the various interface boxes available send and receive just numbers over the same bus I can use one single external to communicate with all hardware interface available for that system. The system is a bit like a hardware equivalent to Max.

Best of all, they allow timing down to microseconds! Of course it's tricky (aka. impossible) to do with Max, but there are ways to tell the hardware something like "switch on for 20us and then switch off again".

Luckily the Beckhoff company likes the idea of their hardware boxes getting used in the art world, so we get some (small) rebate, good support and sometimes they even send some company representative to the opening. I think their usual customers are large factories where their stuff gets used to control assembly lines.

Can you show us an example of the kind of work you can do with this hardware?

This is a project we used the Beckhoff gear in:

It’s probably the largest Max-controlled object in the world! DMX and other signals run through fibre-optic cables because the distances are so large. Here’s a picture showing me in the control room (basement of the majors hall) looking for some lost cables. The whole thing has about 120 light blocks in the ground over a total length of about 300 meters. Each of the columns is 6 meters tall.

If you want to go absolutely crazy with full on industrial sized bits of gear to control your lighting rigs, it’s pretty obvious that Olaf is the guiding light.

I’d like to thank both David and Olaf for spending the time to help me out with these interviews. To finish up - here’s a small list of DMX links I have gathered together, presented in no particular order.

Makers of low cost DMX interfaces and gear: ENTTEC and DMXking

Makers of controllers and dimmer packs: LanBox

A bewildering array of DMX controllable stuff: Blue Point Engineering

A whole range of dimmer packs and other DMX gear: Doug Fleenor design based in California

Enttec distributor, wireless DMX, and a bunch of other stuff: sirs-e

Tiny USB bus powered DMX interface, with Max external: [anyma]

How to wire a 3 pin DMX cable to a 5 pin DMX cable: AV Info

Show control system written in Max, with DMX support for Enttec controllers: H C Gilje

Next up, in article 3, I’m going to walk through the process of creating a small DMX programming project in Max. I also want to thank everyone for all the great links and comments for article 1; please feel free to add in a bunch more for this article!


Hear from experienced DMX and Max programmers, and get a list of links to DMX hardware vendors.

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