Stalagmites & Yo-Yo Ma at Self Comes to Mind, Museum of Natural History, NYC

The idea was to create a synchronized audio-visual performance to mirror the musical composition by Bruce Adolph, "Self Comes to Mind", as performed live by Yo-Yo Ma, John Ferrari, and Ayano Kataoka, based on text by Antonio Damasio and images by Hannah Damasio.

Using a combination of my real-time sound reactive Stalagmites and pre-rendered video created by Jadan Duffin and directed by Diego Miralles, the video was able to closely follow and react to the musicians' performance. There was no guarantee on how the piece would be played live, therefore the video clips and stalagmites had to be triggered and mixed in real time reacting to the music as it was played.

The final video mix was generated on a 3.2ghz i7 965, 12gb RAM, ATI Sapphire 4870 X2, OCZ Vertex SSD x2 RAID 0. Triggers and fades were done with Resolume Avenue using a Blackmagic Intensity Pro to take video in from a Macbook Pro running Stalagmites with Ruby-Processing. Stalagmites was controlled by yet a 3rd laptop connecting to to its web interface.