Liveness in a Virtual World 3 June 2021

Liveness in a Virtual World Fin and Theo - Live Looping

Live Looping is an experimental performance featuring live-projected visuals and audio looping. The piece extends real-time reactive visuals into 3d space through active body tracking technology and the projection of a digitalised skeletal figure. The use of these technologies augments the solo live performance, expanding upon the medium of loop performances.

The performer becomes both a focal point and a vessel for the live projections, communicating with the viewer through a blend of the physical and digital realms. This bridging of mediums results in a unique visual experience whereby two dimensional projections are imbued with depth through interaction with a physical body; oscillating the viewer’s focus between the real and simulated personas.

‘Live Looping’ interprets body-tracking data from Microsoft’s Kinect to generate an adaptive three-dimensional model in TouchDesigner. These figures are captured and recalled through video caching technology in synchronicity with the looped musical parts. For example, When the figure records the bass-line at the start, both audio and video are stored and replayed throughout the performance.

To background the performance, a series of audio-generative and audio-reactive visuals arise from the song. Developed in TouchDesigner, these background visuals use the spectrality of input sounds from the performance to generate abstract shapes and textures which, by nature, are completely synchronous with the music. Additionally, qualities in the song such as spectral density, the spectral midpoint and low or mid frequency peaks determine the colour, scale and/or character of several of the visual patches. Stylistically, the background semantically complements the subject matter and feeling of the piece while directly expanding the musical performance into the visual medium by interpreting the sound itself.

‘Live-Looping’ is a demonstrative stepping stone in the potential for visual enhanced liveperformance. Modern technologies such as real-time input, reactive code and body tracking technology permit the virtualisation of real objects and sound in a digital space and identifies a new, blended medium of performance.

Annika Pine & Kyla Ingham - Playing House

Playing House is an audiovisual representation of the slow realisation that everything is not as perfect as you portray it to be. The song, written by Annika Pine is a comment on a relationship that is crashing and burning around you while pretending that everything is okay.

This video emulates multiple elements from key references such as Haunted House by Holly Humberstone. It features two characters, played by Kyla Ingham and Annika Pine themselves, and aims to merge the worlds of narrative music video storytelling, and a sense of ‘Liveness in a Virtual World’.

One of the key creative ways that we explored the playing house theme was through the use of a doll house. The main character parallels her life with the doll’s, and this both gives her a sense of control that she is lacking in her own life, and pushes forward the theme of a surface level relationship. Dramatised or violent portrayals of things in the dollhouse, particularly the burning of it, juxtapose the calmness of what is happening in the live shots. These dolls and the dollhouse were made by hand to imitate the real life settings that we filmed in.

As it was our first time attempting to do a full length music video, we experimented with camera control. We used mainly still shots earlier in the film to maintain the relationship between the dolls and the live characters. It also assisted us in our beat based approach to editing and to offset the more chaotic nature of the bridge which introduces handheld shots.

Having a clear storyline and vision for the piece, made the editing process quite smooth.

Annika took on a bulk of the editing and found the biggest thing to overcome was audiovisual alignment, especially for musicality’s sake. A beat-based approach was taken which lends itself to the 6/8 nature of the song, and meant that the audience’s emotional experience could be changed with the speed and rate of editing style. A fair amount of colour grading has also been applied as we shot in so many different locations and times of day.

The compositional elements and sound design of Playing House drew from artists such as Phoebe Bridgers to create tight vocal layering. The vocal doubles are a comment on the parallel between Annika’s character and the dolls. As the vocals build, so do the number of settings the characters find themselves in. When the vocals reach their peak, it is as if Annika’s character is singing with all the different versions of herself While filming, Annika performed on the upright piano part seen in the video live. To further add elements of liveness, we used found sounds such as matches striking, fire sounds, kettle boiling and breathing. We use these samples as the percussive elements in the bridge to build the song further. This combination of both live and pre-recorded elements is what really brings Playing House to life.

Arthur Tan - Three cumulative miniatures

Three cumulative miniatures (2021) is a fixed-media audiovisual composition built out of improvised acoustic material on horn. A musique concrète approach is used as the underlying compositional technique: cutting up recorded material and reorganising them in time. Unlike my previous musique concrète pieces however, video is intrinsically involved in this project, and is taken along with the recorded audio as a singular grain of material: only camera audio is used in the entirety of this work, and always strictly concurrent with the visual material, such that there is a strong emphasis on diegetic sound; i.e. we always see the source of the sounds. This direct cause and effect relationship is not always easily attainable where music technology is involved, but here the combination of acoustic raw material, documentative video, and camera audio as our primary building blocks allows for a convenient and often effective "solution" to encouraging acousmatic listening in a digital media format where otherwise uninterested listeners are free to hit the pause button ("ubiquitous" or "distracted" listening). Thus we can say this work is to an extent a digital analogy of a music score, applied to a style of art music where notation is largely irrelevant: we perceive, via

video, the techniques and technologies at play. This then is my take on the concept of "virtual liveness": While we can believe that the composition is something performable in real time, we are also acutely aware that the performance as presented is a virtual construction, and we make no attempt at concealing this from ourselves.

I use the term "cumulative" in the title as a multi-faceted adjective. It describes, firstly, the sequential introduction of distinct sonic material beginning with rapidly tongued air sounds, then percussive strikes on various parts of the instrument, etc., gradually developing by reusing the most salient moments of preceding material while still introducing new sounds; thus, an "accumulation" of sonic events. "Cumulative" describes also the ever-increasing rapidity of fast cuts between different moments in the source material: the musical coherence of the improvisation as recorded is initially preserved in the first miniature where cuts occur sporadically and only to "punctuate" phrases of the improvisation; the frequency of cuts gradually accumulate to a dizzying frenzy in the third miniature (increasing temporal or "horizontal" density). "Cumulative" describes also the textural transition from monophony to polyphony as voices stack and spill over each other, reflected in the video editing process by the increasingly complicated means by which we maintain diegesis in as many voices as possible; it describes the increasing durations of each miniature, the increasingly elaborate compositional development of sonic material, etc. ...

A final thought: The work is of course perfectly functional as an audio-only piece of music; however, video enhances it, encourages acousmatic listening by providing visual stimuli, and most significantly presents the work as a performance of a composition, rather than the playback of fixed-media.

Zed Butel & Tae Young - The Cyber Rave Cave

Hark! dear listeners, for you are about to imbibe a mystic arcana unmatched in secrecy and enigma throughout antiquity. You will glimpse a truth forever reinventing what us mortals have dubbed 'the natural order,' and obliterate your conceptions hitherto, of the way things...beeth...be-eth..

The parable of a cybernetic 'ravius cavius' was first whispered along the Persian spice routes of old, as merchants would vanish from their travelling congregations to be found, sometimes years hence, twerking with such vigour as to confound even the most rigidly woven rationalist cortex. The utterance 'dat booty,' drifted ghostly from the lips of onlookers.

'KING XERXES MUST BE FOREWARNED, FOR WE HAVE BLASPHEMED!!!'

Inevitably, the revealed knowledge of digital dimensions and mystic computing was forced in line with the pre-eminent dogmas of the age, only to resurface in the hushed, dread prophecies of great contemplatives. Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was wholly aware of the rave cave. Rasputin was known to revere it ardently. And L. Ron Hubbard, if his famous theosophy had not taken root, his lesser known dedication to the cult of cavers may have captured the heart of the beloved one, Tom Cruise.

Only today, in the suburbs of Brisbane, did the revelation elect two QCGU students, Tae Young, and Zed Butel, to ferry across the cybernetic plane.

Now it is your turn, so relax and float downstream. It is not dying. It's the r@vE c@v5.

A mix of narrative and non-linear elements make up this performance, inspired by the ebb and flow of live streaming musicians like Marc Rebillet. The theatrical bookends, and the sporadic ‘musical/visual’ character walk the line between performance and music video.

Many digital elements were brought together to create this performance--various lenses, cameras, lighting and digital pre and post production make up the tapestry of The Cyber Rave Cave.

Hugh Sinclair and Liam Hartley - 2D

For this virtual performance, our main idea was a song performed by multiple versions of us.

Each version plays a different instrument within the song. To do this, we recorded multiple takes of us playing each instrument in the song. In post-production, we then cut out each different clip of someone playing their instrument and then stitched them all together. We also recorded a B roll of footage which consists of close ups of us performing our instruments.

By compositing these together, we have been able to demonstrate the performance of our song.

The song itself contains two halves: the first half a soundscape using an atmospheric palette of sounds and the second half an aggressive, pumping electronic dance song. This is the reasoning behind the name of the song, “2D”, as in two dimensional. The main inspiration we used for the song was the French electronic music scene, in particular the artists Justice and Carpenter Brut. We wanted to create an aggressive song similar to this style of electronic music but wanted to build it up using a soundscape composition to really catch the listener off guard. The main problem in the composition of this song was the transition between the two halves. In order to counteract this problem, we used some atmospheric sounds in the dance part of the song. If you listen closely, you may be able to hear them!

For lighting, we used DMX lights synced to MIDI in order to create lighting that could transition automatically between the two different parts of the song. The first section uses blue lighting to represent the dreamy soundscape of the first half of the performance, while the second section uses red lighting to match the aggressive song of the second half of the performance.

As for the video portion of this work, everything was done in order to reflect and enhance the music being heard. Notice all of the slowed down clips with smooth fading transitions between them in the atmospheric part of the song, contrasting the quick cuts and movements seen in the more rhythmic EDM section. Colour-grading and other postproduction techniques were also used to further enhance this sense of connectivity between the visual and audio, reinforcing the diegetic nature of this virtual performance. We hope you enjoy our virtual performance.

Hannah & Sasha - The Trees & The Bees

The Trees & The Bees is an 80s dream pop inspired piece of work by Sasha and Hannah.

Our aim was to create a piece of media that showcased our musical abilities, supported by Film and diegetic elements. We wanted to approach the project with a commercial mind-set, believing that our piece of work would be an asset to our graduating portfolios. Inspired by successful & commercial multimedia pieces from artists such as Gus Dapperton and Wigz, our piece of work hopes to represent the same style of aesthetic.

The Trees & The Bees is reminiscent of the 80s and dripping with nostalgia, evident in the use of synths, marimba, and quintessential 80s drum timbres. The vocals and lyrics expand upon this aesthetic whilst adding a sense of whimsy and quirkiness to the piece.

To combine the defined audio aesthetic with the visual component, location was carefully selected to represent not only the lyrical context of the song but also the overarching vibe.

The colour pallet was thought about deeply from the outset and the vast majority of filming was done in such a way as to support ideas for post-production, Lighting and image detail played a huge part in the capture.

In post, subtle colour enhancement and quality degredation was applied to bring the visual into line with the audio.

In every triumph, first there are challenges to overcome. When learning new skills there are always adjustments to be made, Sasha & Hannah found the video post-production the most challenging in terms of managing colours on export as they found their colours struggled to translate from system to state, all said and done the duo are proud of the outcome as they believe this piece delivers a positive vibe and hope that he audience can connect in the same way.

Sam & Spencer - The Story

Our video, titled The Story, is a tale of two travelers attracted by the power of music. These two individuals are in separate locations by the Brisbane river. As the music begins and grows louder, you will see them make their journey towards each other along the Brisbane River.

They both separately see the Story Bridge and decide it is where they need to go, so with instruments in hand and music in full swing, they set off. The river running beside them and the bridge to which they both travel seemingly link them as they groove their way to their destination.

The river and bridge are heavy themes for the video and feature frequently in the videography, as you will see transitions between these elements numerous times. The positive mood, themes, and music lend themselves to an upbeat and fast editing style which has been used throughout. Color grading and adjustment layers have been used to create a cohesion across all scenes which glues the visual piece together.

One of the travelers uses a 35mm film camera to take photos of the Story Bridge at various stages of the journey, which contrast the colors of the video and break up the continuity, while adding to the handheld, home-video style of filming. To communicate that the music was performed live in the video, the travelers carry their instruments with them, one with a synth, the other with a microphone. While challenging to record with instruments, a bit of jerry-rigging and innovation got us there in the end. We hope you enjoy our music video, “The Story.”

Nicholas Broome, Sidhant Moktan, Rhys Evans - Picturesque

Our audio-visual piece is called Picturesque, due to the visually attractive, vibrant and rich scenery that we have filmed and chosen to tell a story through. This is a story that smoothly moves through the two very different nature and scenic environments of Karawatha Forest and Wellington Point. From the green filled, 900 hectare bushland with deep nature walks and clean air of Karawatha, to the vast, blue ocean lookout and open sandbank of Wellington Point.

The composition of this song was created before the making of the video, but with the locations and visual shots in mind. Each group member was involved in both the filming and composing sector of the audio-visual work. The composition includes elements of nature captured at the locations but also incorporating modern electronic elements. In other words this is a fusion of electronic and acoustic. The guitar is the main focus of this composition as it provides a motif throughout the video through Karawatha and Wellington Point.

The contrasting shots between Wellington Point and Karawatha provide a narrative/journey that is taken throughout the video. With the slow transitions and percussive cuts the entire atmosphere of the video is enhanced with the audio recording supporting it. The chorus of the song with the video brings together the artists in one establishing shot to create an impact and set an image of the music with hard electronic music with glitch effects to enhance the video.

The intention of this piece is to create a contrast that is incredibly clear sonically but also is representing and matching the areas that were filmed. With the dichotomy of the chorus being nearly entirely synthetic and the other elements being entirely acoustic. The composition has been purposefully crafted to leave space and ambience, only carefully using acoustic instruments or recorded foley, to envelop the listener in the serene, natural environments that are showcased visually. This is then completely switched as soon as the synthetic, aggressively electronic section comes in and the visuals are carefully crafted to follow suit. Cascading colours, swirling textures and a plethora of motion within the visuals are shown to now bend the form of the nature that was once normal to intertwine with the now hard-hitting electronic synthesis. Taking inspiration from nature, the electronic sound design has been tailored to reflect the spaces recorded. With the roaring, screeching lead synthesizers sounding much like a bird chirping and the synth chord stacks providing a gust of air indicative of the spaces recorded.