Interactive Musical Video System: Week 2 Update

For this week, I pre-ordered the Dubler Studio Kit microphone described by its creator company Vochlea Music as “a real-time vocal recognition MIDI controller. It offers up a never seen before way to translate your musical ideas into reality, using the one instrument you’ve been practising since birth — the voice.” I am excited to see how I can map this to various MIDI parameters in Ableton Live 10. I am thinking that I can map it to parameters that control video effects as well as synthesizers. Because I am running the Zwobot VJ modules and other Max for Live modules, I predict that there may be some latency issues.

I am also getting in-ear monitors to be able to better hear music during live performances as I prepared a setlist of songs to perform with my interactive video system. My thoughts on creating this setlist are to use high energy and recognizable songs like Celldweller’s The Imperial March (Pegboard Nerds Remix) for one part and dreamlike songs like that of vaporwave and songs with a similar atmosphere.

One of the high energy songs in my setlist

I chose many electronic songs that are realistic to play drums along to and may have to edit transitions between these songs, possibly make parts of songs performable on the SPD-SX, and choose sections from and shorten certain songs. In addition, if I am to play for around an hour like I did for the IMM Fall Show, I will need to use premade songs and also use some of my own music as it is not realistic to make an hour of new original music in this semester.

A vaporwave or “Z e l d a w a v e” song in my setlist

I looked over how to optimize Ableton Live and my computer for Zwobot from https://www.zwobotmax.com/manual/, particularly reading the “Performance Guide” and “Further improvement suggestions” sections. From using the velocity and Expression Control trick from last week’s reflection, I mapped the random velocity values to the EX_RMTE Zwobot module and was successful in being able to trigger random videos from MIDI notes. The videos do seem to pause for a split second before changing though, which might be able to be masked by Zwobot video effects. This video explains the intended use of the EX_RMTE module: