Pressure Project 3
Posted: March 21, 2021 Filed under: Nick Romanowski, Pressure Project 3 | Tags: Nick Romanowski Leave a comment »For Pressure Project 3, I wanted to tell the story of creation of earth and humanity through instrumental music. One of my favorite pieces of media that has to do with the creation of earth and humanity, is a show that once ran at EPCOT at Walt Disney World. The nighttime spectacular was called Illuminations: Reflections of Earth and used music, lighting effects, pyrotechnics, and other elements to convey different acts showcasing the creation of the universe and our species.
I took this piece of music into Adobe Audition and split the track up into different pieces of music and sounds that could be manipulated or “visualized” in Isadora. My idea was to allow someone to use their hands to “conduct” or influence each act of the story as it plays our through different scenes in Isadora. The beginning of the original score is a series of crashes that get more and more rapid as time approaches the big band and kicks off the creation of the universe. Using your hands in Isadora, you become the trigger of that fiery explosion. As you bring your hands closer to one another, the crashes become more and more rapid until you put them fully together and you hear a loud crash and screech and then immediately move into the chaos of the second scene which is the fires of the creation of the universe.
Act 2 tracks a fire ball to your hand using the Leap Motion. The flame effect is created using a GLSL shader I found on shader toy. A live-drawing actor allows a tail to follow it around. A red hue in the background flashes in sync with the music. This was an annoyingly complicated thing to accomplish. The sound frequency watcher that flashes the opacity of that color can’t listen to music within Isadora. So I had to run my audio through a movie player that outputted to something installed on my machine called Soundflower. I then set my live capture audio input to Soundflower. This little path trick allows my computer to listen to itself as if it were a mic/input.
Act 3 is the calm that follows the conclusion of the flames of creation. This calm brings green to the earth as greenery and foliage takes over the planet. The tunnel effect is also a shader toy GLSL shader. Moving your hands changes how it’s positioned in frame. The colors also have opacity flashes timed with the same Soundflower effect described in Act 2.
I unfortunately ran out of time to finish the story, but I would’ve likely created a fourth and fifth act. Act 4 would’ve been the dawn of humans. Act 5 our progress as a species to today.