Josh Clos produced this documentary short about the GMS recently. He and his colleagues Julie Kistler and Brian Smith shot video during my performance in Downtown Minneapolis with Minneapolis Art on Wheels on May 13, 2009. Later Josh interviewed me in the audio studio at Art Institutes Minnesota where I teach interactive media and audio production. As a student in my audio production class, Josh edited the sound and video together with minimal input from myself. His short illustrates what the GMS does and how I’ve been using it to compose music in real-time. Thanks, Josh, for a job well done!
Speaking of the GMS, I have recently slowed down its development, and I’m considering releasing a beta version of the application in a few months. Soon afterward I plan to release the code as Open Source so that the application can be developed further by artists interested in creating music through gestural input.
Agreed. Great job Josh!
And congrats John. This is a great introduction and press piece for the GMS. I can already see it on the front page for its website when released. Such a great thing to release it as Open Source. Can’t wait to get a PC render?!?!
great stuff!
Amazing, simply amazing. Spreading the word about this. The results are incredible….
I find this an inspiration. To my mind this is part of a change in music-making that will open up the process to many more people. It becomes an expression of intuition and discovery rather than (for example) rote learning of notes. I look forward to exploring the beta version when it comes out. Congratulations on your creation. It’s brilliant!
About a month ago, I wrote a little program in processing that took in webcam input and outputted sound. I hadn’t heard of GMS at the time, but it ended up sounding quite similar (at least to the sounds in the video!) I ended up sending midi data to electric piano-ish instruments in Live, as it sounds like you did at least for the song in the video.
Of course, GMS seems far more advanced, with many more features and greater control. Mine was a pretty simple program; basically it had three channels, for R, G and B. It based the pitch on the brightness, then the volume on the saturation of that color component in the frame.
I eagerly await the release of GMS!
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Hey there!
Cool doco, and great program. Looking forward to seeing more applications of it.
Heres was my take on it -> http://pmidic.sourceforge.net/
I haven’t updated it for a while…also Windows only.
– Ben X Tan
benxtan.com
hi there :) I’m very excited to started using the GMS but it does not recognize my webcam. I’m running Vista and have a logitech 200 webcam. Perhaps the program only reads certain devices, but I couldn’t find documentation on this. Thanks for any advice you can give!
Mandy
@mandy. Grant Muller posted some detailed instructions on how to use the GMS with Windows. As a Mac user I haven’t attempted it. You’ll have to go a few pages into the comments to find his documentation. Just search for Grant. Cheers!