Generating Real-Time Visual Meaning for Live Indian Drumming :: Music Rhythm Drums Musical Essays

Generating Real-Time Visual Meaning for Live Indian Drumming Abstract: In this essay, a system developed to generate visual meaning for live performed music is described. Specifically, this system is calibrated to respond to North Indian classical and folk drumming tradition, using custom designed digital musical interfaces, such as the Electronic Tabla and Electronic Dholak. A drum, when struck, does not generate its sound as a record of the force applied, but as an artifact of a physical response to that strike within the artistically controlled conditions of its material state. With the design of the North Indian drum controllers, we developed a physical model for digital audio synthesis to recreate the aural qualities of the drums’ response under the control of the player. From there, we abstracted that concept to develop a dynamically responsive model for real-time rhythmic visual synthesis. In creating a visual experience for North Indian classical music, we sought to create a dynamic visual accompaniment with an appropriate ambience for the patterns and complexities of North Indian drumming. The design process was shaped by the need to react to a series of signals that would be received from the musician through the digitized musical interfaces, while giving a visual performer the ability to modify and shape those reactions over the course of the performance. In contrast to using a prerendered or abstract visualization, we aim to create an audiovisual composition which is both aesthetically compelling and responsive to the conditions of live performance, in addition to providing a meaningful visual context for what the performer is playing. In this essay, we will describe: - Veldt: a custom built application for visual expression of musical performance. - Digital Indian Drums: the Electronic Tabla and Electronic Dholak which digitize gestural information of a live performer. - Rhythmic visualization of our system used in live performances. Veldt Veldt is an application which was designed from the ground up for the purpose of visual expression and performance. It receives MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) and OSC (Open SoundControl)[1] messages from digital musical interfaces and maps them to a system of reactive events in order to generate live visuals, which are rendered real-time using the OpenGL[2] graphics language. Mappings are flexible: sets of mappings may be arranged and modified during the design and rehearsal process, and triggered by control events during different movements of a performance, and arbitrary text, images, video, and geometric models may be used as source material.