Music is Math is Beauty

June 26, 2009 9:52 PM

Glenn Marshall is an Irish computer video artist and musician whose recent work has focused on audio visualization programed in the Processing language. Generally the program is left to its own devices, though his work-for-hire has more intentional design, as in his video for the Peter Gabriel song "The Nest that Sailed the Sky." Marshall has also been hired to create video for Guinness for Sky TV and the Rugby Six Nations Tournament, and a looping animation for Hermes of Paris. Marshall discusses his works with some detail on his blog. (More videos inside)

The tree-like visuals employ his ZenO process, as seen in following videos:

Music Is Math (unfinished) (3:15) first animation in Processing. Inspired by the Boards of Canada track 'Music is Math' from Geogaddi (blog post)
The 'Mandela' Variation (3:45) variation of 'Music is Math,' using Nelson Mandela's prison number as the seed value (blog post)
Music is Math (final version) (5:24) "I just let the program run till the end of the music" (blog post)
Metamorphosis (2:49) based on Boards of Canada's 'Corsair,' also from Geogaddi (blog post)
Radiohead - 'Bodysnatchers' (4:11) song from In Rainbows. Marshall's first attempt at music visualization (blog post)
Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake suite (5:45) entirely generative/audio reactive animation, i.e. no keyframing or manual input or editing (blog post)
The Nest That Sailed The Sky (test) (5:06) Music by Peter Gabriel, from his album OVO – The Millennium Show (Millennium Dome, London) (blog post)
The Nest That Sailed The Sky (final) (5:07) with three extra visual ideas from photos from the original album shoot: single cells, an empty nest, trails of red berries (blog post)
Hermes window display animation (1:06) the first of a couple of commercial projects that employed Marshall's 'zeno' animation system (blog post)

Other videos:
Marbles (1:29) an early study/realism piece - a nostalgic homage to classic computer raytracing (blog post)
Landscapes (4:49) a test made with Terragen, music by Ligeti; inspired by Kubrick and Koyaanisqatsi cinematography (blog post)
Latte-mation (1:15) a test done with 3ds Max and After Effects (blog post)
Butterfly (10:00) Marshall's first short film, commissioned by the Irish Film Board in 2002, which made rounds at film fests (blog post)
The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus (4:45) a short animated guide to Buddhist breath meditation, with narration adapted from a talk given by Ajahn Brahm (blog post)
Animated Guinness from Fractals (1:26) "One of my few minor claims in life is the first to animate Guinness for TV, and all using math" (blog post)
The Red Rose of Newcastle (2:58) a short film commissioned for a regional BBC series called Days Like This (blog post)

Work with Peter Gabriel:
The Drop (3:08) first music video, for Peter Gabriel, made in 2003 - made on his own time, but eventually included on an official DVD, and paid for his time. The song is from the album Up (blog post)
Quiet Steam (6:27) second video for Peter Gabriel, a b-side track from Digging In The Dirt (blog post)
Visuals for 'No Self Control' (live recording) (4:38) which consists lots of Processing work (procedural animation) and sequences from some of ‘Butterfly’ (blog post)

Glenn Marshall is now working on two projects: a Graphic Synthesizer program that uses the same principles of wave synthesis but to generate changing images, (blog posts 1, 2, 3 and Graphic Synthesiser Demo (3:51), 4, 5) and an iPhone App (blog post 1, 2 and iPhone App Test #1 video (1:06))

posted by filthy light thief (7 comments total)

Another Radiohead track from In Rainbows was visualized with Processing: Weird Fishes (previously).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:55 PM on June 26 [1 favorite]

I would not have thought it possible to make Nest That Sailed The Sky more haunting.
posted by docpops at 10:16 PM on June 26

I remember when this kind of thing was put out as a Winamp plug in. Now we just get iPhone apps? weak (of course, you can actually get paid for iPhone apps, so there's that)
posted by delmoi at 10:20 PM on June 26

These are rather lovely, thank you for posting them.
posted by Artw at 10:27 PM on June 26

The color version of ZenO is awesome.
posted by juv3nal at 10:44 PM on June 26

It's amazing to me how productive Proce55ing is. For something that started as a way to easily make little 100x100 Java applets embedded in web browsers, it's spawned a lot of beautiful high resolution images. And video.
posted by Nelson at 7:41 AM on June 27

:-) ... this is the Why of MeFi ...

Thank you, @ flithy light thief, for this.
posted by aldus_manutius at 9:55 AM on June 27