Audio-Triggered Visuals [Under Construction]
Using audio to trigger effects or glitches can be achieved using a variety of sophisticated digital plugins, software, and analogue modules, and I use a few vintage devices within a more elaborate chain to create patterns or affect footage that’s treated and layered within Adobe After Effects and Premiere.
The following snapshots & extracts are mere samples of what’s possible for abstract and stylized footage customized for your project.
[ATARI C-240 STILLS]
Let’s start with the most unique, the Atari Video Music C-240, which debuted in 1976 and was in production in NTSC and PAL models for roughly 2 years. Written off as unmemorable, the gizmo’s blocky emulations are limited, but their colours are extraordinarily vivid, and patterns created from stereo inputs can vary from singular to multiple, as well as various layers.
My C-240 is unmodified, meaning it has no tweaks nor hacks, and outputs video as a RF signal, as the device was designed to be plugged into a convention TV set using a RF coax connector. To ensure the footage is clean, you have to fiddle with contrast, brightness, and colour saturation to eliminate inherent RF noise, and tackle lost frames from hiccups within the device.
For the excerpted THE MASK Q&A in this video (skip to 2:09 into the video), the C-240 footage was cleaned up with manual frame-by-frame edits and the insertion of clean black background, and components were magnified, warped, repositioned, flipped, layered, and stretched to enhance the images. The entire audio was fed into the C-240, and all original colours, patterns, layers, and combinations were done live.
[MOSAIC OF STILLS]
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The next gizmo is a similarly rare Video Colorizer by my favourite dead company, Showtime Video Ventures, of whom I use a substantial amount of their all-in-one and effects-specific video processors. Seemingly designed as a dare by engineers, the Colorizer takes in composite video, and will affect colorized images from stereo audio sources, but with an emphasis on less is more.
It’s a tricky device, as one has to adjust the audio levels gently, and wait for a pulsing image to begin, where colours bloom and shift according to similarly gentle twists of the potentiometers. Too much audio blows out the image, but the right combination can yield trippy results, with bass (unsurprisingly) pushing colours into deeper ranges:
The Colorizer has two options: affecting video footage, or internally generated abstract patterns which, like the Atari C-240, can be layered & multiplied:
This making-of blog includes further details, frame grabs, and links to Vimeo and YouTube clips, whereas these more recent IGTV tests emphasize the use of the unit in tandem with Showtime Video Ventures’ mixer / SEG and processors, as triggered by pulses from an Exact Log Sweep Function Generator:
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Both examples illustrate the variety of options in which you can use abstract and video footage, and the variety of results when the video footage is fed through Showtime’s SEG mixer and processor. The treated footage can be mixed live with the original clean footage, or layered within a digital timeline, and sweetened or tempered with additional adjustments.
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There exist several types of ‘scopes designed to measure electrical signals, audio phasing, video alignment, and more, and I specifically use three types – Oscillosope, Vectorscope, and Waveform – to capture pulsing & twisting patterns. What’s filmed off a screen with or without a graticule is treated within After Effects and / or Premiere, and what emerges is often very different from the original raw material.
[OSCOPE IMAGE]
Oscillosopes will display audio waves, and those with X-Y display will create pulsing bursts. If they have a Z-input, the audio volume can enlargen the waves. And when colorized
A variation of displaying oscilloscope waves involves the use of an 8-channel multiplexer which stacks 8 ‘tracks’ which in turn are treated within Premiere:
It’s also possible to achieve thicker lines using much older ‘scopes, such as this 1970s B&K Precision, which uses a round CRT tube:
Both round and standard square CRT oscilloscopes were used for this podcast in which each interview segment differs – some colour tinted, some in B&W, and some stacked and reoriented into larger pulsing patterns:
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[VECTORSCOPE IMAGE]
A vectorscope is primarily used to ensure the three colours of video – red, green, and blue – are properly aligned, or in phase – to ensure accurate colour reproduction. Although its use is more limited than oscilloscopes and waveform monitors, it’s still possible to achieve unique patterns, as with this excerpt for a podcast, where audio was fed into a Showtime Colorizer,and as the pulses created colour shifts, the changes in colour alignment affected the display within a vectorscope, causing twisting shapes subsequently treated in Premiere.
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[IMAGES]
A waveform monitor can be used for audio and video, and for a podcast & album tease, audio was fed into an waveform monitor, sent into the Showtime Video Colorizer, and treated within Premiere:
The following Blog includes a link to the IGTV teaser visuals, and examples of other patterns possible with a vectorscope.
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(Conclusion)
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