SOLARIS: visual vinyls

Thursday 26th of April 2012.

The SOLARIS project uses painted discs to create music and is led by French artist Thierry Guibert. Thierry crafts beautiful graphics  on vinyls. These vinyls are used on a special set of turntables, where the diamond stylus is replaced by a  camera to capture images as the disc spins mechanically. The aim of the presentation is to workshop strategies for using visuals to control music events. A few musical examples will be presented.The goal of this project is to create musical content for each disc, allowing to perform with a revisited DJ set, and adding to the performance beautiful and meaningful visuals.

Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut works with Thierry on this project, to analyse the images captured by the camera and to produce musical results.  The visuals are analysed with the OpenCV library of OpenFrameworks, and the data is shared among applications using OSC.

The video below shows how the image flow is analysed in ‘blobs’ (using contour detection). These blobs may have different sizes, which is shown on the right side of the video.  For each blob, an average colour is calculated. At every frame of the video correspond a number of blobs, which can be used to create sounds.