Driving visuals from a midi loop

Here’s an early and very simple example of how you can take the midi loop transmitted from Steppa to drive some visuals. Every sound you hear in this video is doing something to the visuals. Some are obvious like making the main shape jump around and spin, and then there are some other effects that are more subtle, like the crystallize filter that appears later. The way I did this was through Quartz Composer via the midi note receiver… it’s a really cool effect!

Programmatic visuals from a midi loop from stevecooley on Vimeo.

What I like about this is that unlike a “music visualizer”, it’s not reacting to bands of the audio spectrum, it’s reacting directly to the midi loop, so there’s absolutely no question about what instrument is driving what visual element. More to come soon!