Live, Realtime 3D+Music

I saw this performance about a year ago at the Pd~conference of chdh, made up of the French brothers Cyrille and Damien Henry. Its an amazing combo of realtime 3D graphics and live music. The same control data generates the music and the visuals, so the performance is tightly linked, and really quite well done, with lots of attention paid to thematic development in both the music and the visuals. This is in stark contrast to the vast majority of VJing, which is some nifty or pretty visuals at best loosely related to the music.

There have been many comparisons to the Autechre video Gantz Graf, which is proported to have more complicated graphics. But there is a huge difference here: Gantz Graf is rendered and probably took weeks if not months to produce. chdh's stuff is all live, generated in realtime, controlled by two linked motorized MIDI control surfaces.

Also, in terms of artistry, chdh really shows mastery of the OpenGL medium. While Gantz Graf is stuck on transformations and views around the central point of OpenGL, chdh's work breaks out from that central point on many levels, feeling much more fluid.

Check it out: chdh.net