Sat
22
Nov 2014

Yesterday I had an opportunity - for the first time - to show my visualizations as a VJ on a music party. The party was called PsyChill Evening, took place in Paszcza Lwa, Gdańsk, Poland and its musical style was described as "Psychill, Psybient, Downtempo, Psydub and Ambient".

Just like DJ is someone who plays music, a VJ is an auxilliary role of someone who makes visualizations in real-time, displayed using a beamer. There is some software dedicated for this, like Resolume or ArKaos, but what can be more fun for a graphics software enginner than coding my own software? So I made one. Honestly, I planned to write program like this for years, while now I had to do it in just one week, right before the party. It's written in C++ using DirectX 11. Here is how the result looks like:

As you can see, the rendering here is not very sophisticated, CPU- or GPU-intensive. There are just some 2D textures transformed and blended together (plus feedback from previous frame, plus symmetry) - all fading in and out smoothly, as it was for chillout music. But that's not the point here. There is some interesting code under the hood, like the way a "scene" is described in memory with all these changes that happen over time. Time is expressed inside the program not in seconds, but in beats, so after setting right BPM (Beats Per Minute), it synchronizes nicely with the music. The movement of these textures, as well as color transformations are all procedurally generated and random, so it's somewhat different every time. Of course, there is much more to be done here. But now all I need is some sleep :)

I love electronic dance music, so I'm very happy I could connect it wih my profession - graphics programming :D

Comments | #music #psytrance #vj #events Share

Comments