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Cycle of Life

Cycle of Life is an audio-reactive projection mapping performance that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birthday of famed composed Richard Strauss. The piece was led by Xavi Bové, a self-titled Visual Music Director (and rightfully so, check out his page for a collection of other impressive works), and included backend work Pelayo Méndez to create the interactive experience by linking together the audio and visual components using openFrameworks.

Here are a few more details from the project description:

“The proposal of Xavi Bové, an artist who works on the relationship between music and images, use technology to offer a critical reflection on how to process the stimuli that our senses pick up, as well as create a bridge between artistic expression and the public. The key to this performance is the design and development of a code by Pelayo Méndez, who analyze in real time the music and transform into generative graphics for each of the scenes. This code has been created in openFrameworks, open source toolkit designed for ‘creative programming.’ The notes of the piano intervene on the stones of the building and generate particles that have an organic and interactive behavior according to the voice of the singer.”

Starting at about 1:20 in the video, notice how the graphics fade in and out in the transition between songs, and the visual tempo of the particles and graphics seems to be tied to the tempo of the audio.

An interesting footnote about the project states: “This project can be adapted to other spaces and other music by modifying the code.”We’re not sure if this is what they meant, but wouldn’t it be awesome if the audio/video content automatically and dynamically adapted to new scenes and sounds? Either way, we’d love to see this software in action!