Painting w/ Music
- Categories Electronics, Games, Music, Sound
In 2017 I worked extensively with South Africa based game designer and programmer Cukia “Sugar” Kimani on Painting w/ Music, a project that involved visualising live gestural performance and audio.
Cukia approached me with the idea to develop a system for creating digital “paintings” from music. Our discussions were super interesting, and with the support of the British Council through their Connect ZA programme we were able to work together for several months, turning the project into something very performance-based and a whole lot of fun.
The end result was a customised controller system for performing a set of music which Cukia used to generate digital visualisations in real time. We performed several times in Johannesburg in September 2017, at the Fak’ugesi Bloc Party and at A MAZE Festival.
The images you see in the gallery were all generated during the performance. They used a mixture of audio analysis and gestural data from the custom controllers, and were tweeted out as they were created.
The controller use arcade buttons and string controllers and is built into a cigar box – I’ve since used it on a number of projects. Here’s a video of me testing out some sound design ideas for the project.
You can watch the entire live performance at Fak’ugesi here: