2008 Jul 12 - Sat

Open Source: Sonic Visualizer

This blog entry should actually go under the title of Open Source Package of the Day, but because it solves a different problem for me, it comes under the heading of Lighting.

Back in April, I did lighting for a student Jazz group. As part of the show, I wanted to do my own little ditty. My desire was to do a mini light show set to music. In some shows, I've seen the lighting designer loosely sync the lighting display to the music theme. My goal for this particular display was to ave the light show visibly keep time to the beat of the music.

I considered quite a number of ways to do this. Some more manual than others. A key feature had to do with my inherent 'laziness'. Why should I have to manually redo and retranscribe the beat when I should be able to get that out of the music file itself? Easier said than done. I first turned to Cakewalk's Sonar Producer Edition to do waveform analysis for me. With the waveform editor, it is easy to find 'note starts'. Those note starts don't necessarily carry the rhythm. Another tool within Sonar allows one to filter to certain frequencies. I was interested in the bass beats. That helped, but would still very time consuming to identify and place a note by hand.

I finally cheated. I found a fully functional MIDI file of Pinky and the Brain. All the instruments were nicely laid out, plus it had a kick drum track. This kick drum track was monotone, as a kick drum track should be. This made it dead easy to set off cues from the MIDI input in Light Factory. I ended up with a 20 to 30 second subsection with 157 cues.

The little ditty worked very well and the audience loved it.

Now that I've figured out music timing, light timing, and integrating the two, not to mention that amount of time one can spend on making it look easy, I've been thinking of turning the concept up a notch, and maybe doing a larger production.

Up till now, I figured I'd only be able to this with MIDI tracks, as the timing and instruments are all laid out, and I really didn't/don't want to go back to waveform analysis, at least being limited to what Sonar provides.

Enter Sonic Visualizer. With this, one can take a mucic track and run the standard note start tools on it. The cool feature is the spectrogram views. One can actually see the vibrato of the violin, the beat of the drum, the complex weave of tones of a symphony, .... The program also has a MIMDI annotation feature.

I'll have to manually key in the MIDI notes I want for cue changes, but with the visible segmentation of notes, instruments, and voices, creating and coordinating a lighting show tied to music could be a delight to do. Lots of time will be eaten, but with Sonic Visualizer, Light Factory, and a lighting show visualizer like Capture Console, it could be quite an experience, not only from a design point of view but from an audience pleasure perspective.

Ok, back to daydreaming. In a previous article, I wrote about a light console. Not any ordinary console, but one which is simply a piece of acrylic with infrared sensors on it. This would allow realtime multiple touch live input. By including this in the show, on stage, a light show would become live performance art in itself. I think a live spectogram would be an interesting light show addition in itself. Are there such shows out there?