Sound & Procedural Visuals in TouchDesigner
A bi-monthly TouchDesigner meetup focused on audio-reactive visual workflows.
Tuesday, 2nd June 2026 (9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm UK / 6pm CET)
Featuring: Melissa Santamaría, SARV, Pauric Freeman
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Join us for the June TouchDesigner Meetup: Sound & Procedural Visuals in TouchDesigner. This session explores practical approaches to building responsive visual systems driven by audio, timing data, and real-time control workflows.
The format follows our regular meetup structure: short presentations, technical walkthroughs, and open Q&A with the community. Whether you are new to TouchDesigner or already creating advanced patches, this meetup is designed to help you pick up useful ideas you can apply straight away.
As ever, TouchDesigner Meetups are created in collaboration with Derivative, creators of TouchDesigner. Meetups are curated by Berlin artist and educator Bileam Tschepe, an inspiring creator of audio-reactive, interactive and organic digital artworks, and installations.
Don't forget, TouchDesigner is free for non-commercial use, so grab your copy now.
Presentations
From Sound to Color
This presentation explores art as a state of presence rather than a finished object. Through personal projects and live visual work, Melissa will share how her practice shifted from seeking perfection to embracing process, intuition, and sensation. Inspired by natural phenomena such as water, light, and vibration, her work translates sound into evolving visual systems that feel alive and immersive.
The talk invites the audience to rethink creativity as a ritual and a form of connection — where visuals are not just images, but emotional and energetic experiences that resonate collectively.
- A personal journey from architecture to generative visual art
- Art as presence: shifting from outcome to process
- Creating through intuition, sensation, and “listening” rather than control
- The idea of art as a trigger for experiences, not just an object
- Using sound, color, and vibration as a unified language
- Visual systems inspired by natural phenomena (water, fire, caustics, light)
- Case studies of live visuals and creative direction (music, performances, installations)
- The role of ritual in the creative process
- Collective resonance: art as a shared energetic experience (Scenius)
- Questions and tools to reconnect with creativity from a place of presence
From Audio Signal to Visual Motion: Real-Time Data Extraction and Mapping for VJing
Audio-reactivity is easy to do but hard to do well. Between a kick pulsing a scale and visuals that genuinely breathe with the music, there is a whole layer of extraction, filtering, and shaping the data. In this presentation, SARV shares the methodology he has built through his performances: how to isolate what matters in an audio signal, normalise it to make it usable, and most importantly how to adapt these treatments to the musical context.
Driving a techno set is nothing like driving an ambient live or a hip-hop production. He will also show how to map this data onto specific visual parameters so that a single system can respond with nuance to very different worlds — all within a strictly live logic, built for the stage, illustrated through ARE (Audio Reactive Engine).
- Real-time audio data manipulation and extraction in TouchDesigner
- Adapting processing chains to specific music genres
- Precise mapping to targeted visual parameters
- A workflow built entirely around live performance and VJing
- Demonstrated through ARE (Audio Reactive Engine)
Composition Beyond Sound
A look at extending music composition through live video — exploring how real-time visual systems can become an integral part of the compositional process rather than a supplement to it.
About the speakers
Melissa Santamaría
Melissa Santamaría is a visual artist and creative director working across generative systems, moving image, and spatial practice. Originally trained as an architect, her work is informed by natural and organic processes, using light, motion, and texture to construct immersive visual environments. Her practice focuses on perception as a physical and sensory experience, often developed in dialogue with sound and space. She has presented work across music, art, and cultural contexts, creating projects that sit between the digital and the embodied.
SARV
Edgar Schubhan, aka SARV, is a digital artist trained in electronic engineering. He picked up TouchDesigner two years ago with a focus on audio-reactivity, and has since pushed his practice deep into realtime rendering, custom tooling, and live performance. His work tries to give shape to a feeling he has had since childhood — that there is “more” than what our usual frameworks can describe. Music and nature are his primary triggers.
Pauric Freeman
Pauric Freeman is a multidisciplinary artist from Ireland working across audiovisual performance and installation. He develops custom tools to generate real-time compositions using data collected from live instruments. His performances unfold as structures of dense harmonies and chaotic rhythms, where sound and image operate as related systems, distorting and reconfiguring through permutations. His work has been exhibited and performed in a wide range of venues and festivals, both in Ireland and internationally in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.
Curation
This 2026 series is curated by Bileam Tschepe, aka elekktronaut, a Berlin-based artist and educator who creates audio-reactive, interactive and organic digital artworks, systems and installations in TouchDesigner, collaborating with and teaching people worldwide.
TouchDesigner
TouchDesigner is a software product from Derivative (Toronto and Los Angeles) which is used to build interactive 3D and 2D applications. It is procedural, node-based, real-time, and considered a visual programming language.
TouchDesigner is free to use for non-commercial purposes