By Alex Massaad
This is a demo of some of the powerful stuff you can do with Max 4 Live, the new Max API for Ableton Live 8. This is some very unique and exciting human-computer interaction.
The video demonstrates a webcam plugin that turns on-camera movements, quantizes them to pre-defined notes, and then further adjusts them to a preset musical scale. the result is an instant midi note generator that is controlled by your movement in front of a camera.
Is it musical? Maybe not, but it certainly is cool, and has some definite applications for sound design.
m4l.lab.videomusicbox from liubo on Vimeo.
I wonder what this does to the artistic merit of music. If a great song gets composed using any of this technology it takes a lot of human design out of music. Theoretically your robotic vacuum cleaner can compose a symphony while you're at work, provided you set up the software correctly before hand.