Ableton? worth a shot?

wektor

Well-known member
Can you explain what is happening here @wektor ?
With Ableton 12 I think they introduced what is called "generators", for quick generations of midi clips. So you have multiple options for generating notes arranged in arpeggios, random and euclidean sequences, and what will you. It also allows for creating custom generators in Max.

To generate your own stuff, you get access to the MIDI clip as a big dictionary, think, a json or an excel spreadsheet.

Fundamentally, what you can do is take a video (which is a matrix of color values for each pixels), downsample it to a lower resolution, and set some conditional for which pixels should be turned into notes. Same as if you did very primitive pixel art procedurally, but with midi notes.
Of course it helps to do some edge detection, or at least make the video monochrome.

What actually makes it very fun is it the notes can update fast – faster than the Ableton playback can play them – you can make some pretty cool black MIDI with it, or something very close to what Erkki Kurenniemi did with DIMI-O.

 

catalog

Well-known member
Thank you. Seen a lot of experiments like this over the years. Good to know ppl are still going for it.


This was one I saw in my home town 20 years ago, where they voice pictures. All built separately I think, but stitched to look synchronous.

Are you having a go with all this in ableton 12 then? Post some tests if you are.

I dunno if you saw that early loft/aya piece, dizzee in the rhizome, I think they stitched that in same way to chung with the visuals a bit

 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
Ableton Live Lite is free with many cheap midi controllers (you can get a licence even when you buy these items 2nd hand) and some IOS apps . Very good tool.
 

wektor

Well-known member
This was one I saw in my home town 20 years ago, where they voice pictures. All built separately I think, but stitched to look synchronous.
Yeah the main good thing nowadays is you can so easily edit video+audio, even straight up in Ableton, which for whatever reason feels less bloated than with Adobe Premiere or any other software abomination of the kind. Also things like Max allow for quick and easy interaction, if you want to have visuals reacting to audio or midi notes, it's really not that complicated to set up. Much more complicated to do something interesting with it though that doesn't look like the UKF dubstep visualisers.
Are you having a go with all this in ableton 12 then? Post some tests if you are.
Yeh! I will need to add some image pre-processing, since for now just doing brightness detection does not work so well. It should be fun to develop further, since I got the basic idea running already.
You really get some issues of the representational matter, ie. how does it matter what notes are there if they are not being played? And what's a good proportion to downsample by, if you want a recognisable image, but also something that doesn't sound like all notes hit at the same time?
 

0bleak

A Liniment's Evil Work
One lesson so far and it's already starting to make a lot more sense to me.
The funny thing is that my teacher is dyslexic so he kind of has the inverse of my visual/spatial processing nvld issues.
 

0bleak

A Liniment's Evil Work
some more thoughts on ableton now that I'm coming more to grips with it:

I think one of the most WTF things about it, is that there a number of differences, not major differences, but all sorts of tiny little things that are different between the mac and pc versions, and apparently, I guess, most tutorials and information online seems to be geared towards mac users.

Now, this might not be a big deal to people that don't have fairly impactful mental disabilities, but if you've got visual/spatial issues, and tend take things literally, this is the kind of thing that makes you want to smash your laptop.
I can see no good reason for calling something one thing on a mac version and then calling it something else on the pc version, nor can I see a good reason for moving the placement of some little things here and there.
I mean, f*ckin hell, ableton is confusing enough as it is without that!

I guess I'm the only person in the world that uses the pc version because the professor from calarts I've taken a few lessons from has also been confused by it and has never seen these things before that he sees when I'm sharing my screen with him, but he also says that every person he's taught uses a mac, so I guess that's what I get for using a pc, apparently!

My other thought is that maybe I should have held off on also getting Push 3.
My thought process was that having a piece of tactile hardware to interact with the program would help me, but it hasn't one bit.
I mean, it's still nice to have for the very few things I'm using it for so far, but def not worth the money yet - in fact, after I finish these next two final ableton lessons I signed up for (total of 6 lessons, but that's it for me 'cause it ain't cheap!), I might need to find someone to teach me Push!
 
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