Charlotte symphony has visuals

My VCOM 362 class just finished a group project for the Charlotte NC. Symphony that generated mini-animations using keyboard input. One student "played" the animation generator (animatorator?) with the Symphony ensemble which was displayed on a large screen over the stage during the performance. There were many comments and congratulations on the work the students had done and the final visuals that were displayed. Thanks to Dr. Ron Parks for his invitation to produce something for his piece of music, "I thought I had better let you know".

This is not a new idea, I had just seen another version of it at SIGGRAPH 2009 (at least my 3rd) where a young man used 3D animations. His controls allowed for pan and tilt views of colored explosions as well as forward/back/left/right motion. The audience was somewhat skeptical of the final product that they were experiencing in part because of his lack of experience with the visuals and also because of the monotony of the repeated animations. There also seemed to be a disconnect between the selected 3D objects and the music (mainly jazz - it was in New Orleans).

We had the advantage of restricting the animatorator to one set of visuals that pertained to the lyrics of the song which happened to be a love letter. Illustrations that related to the song were also very specific. We had a short rehearsal before the final production which helped to set the tempo of the piece but could have been better had we had time to practice. You could see that with the same dedication to playing an instrument one could be an accomplished player.

Technically speaking we had set up the applet with a number of arrays to separate the various stanzas, giving us more flexibility to introduce more images, texts and animations, etc. We did not use the full keyboard in order to simplify the playing and we generated random 2D coordinate positions on the screen to give a more spontaneous feel to the visual. Once an object was placed on the screen you could populate around the origin of that object by repeating the keystroke. This gave the player more control over concentrations of the objects so that the overall composition of the screen had some focal point and balance. We assigned an 'erase' key so that objects could be removed from the stacking order and so we could minimize the amount of objects at quiet points in the music or we could populate the screen for more visual impact and create visual excitement at high points in the piece. Other controls included scale and orientation. We also set tonal value (white through black) to each object and no color was used.

I will post some screen captures in the coming days.