Next month I have a concert that is being planned at Le Bourg in Lausanne. Le Bourg was a cinema that closed some years ago and was transformed into a Café-Théâtre. I’ll say more about the upcoming event soon.

As it was a cinema, it’s a great place for projecting visuals and I want to take this chance to setup my first “visual installation”. I use Processing so I’m coding in Java… and I realize that my code starts looking like a piece of crap. I’ve been focused on visual rendering rather than modelisation I guess.

I’ve got different renderings but the main process is simple: I get the frequency spectrum of the incoming audio signal (using the Sonia library), it returns an array of values which correspond to the amplitude of frequency bands. For each value I draw an object for which the shape, position and transparency change depending on sound. The color is picked from an image so it’s easy to control the set of colors. It never gives the same results thanks to some random settings.

I hope I’ll manage to complete that work before the event. At least I have a friend who’s ok to give me his laptop for running the Processing patch during the concert.