A year ago I explored visual control by plugging a generic Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller in Apple’s Quartz Composer . My initial intention was to drive some animations and visuals during Cool Cavemen ’s live concerts. Now that’s I’ve abandoned the idea of using Quartz Composer, it’s time to share these stuff with you.

So here is my MIDI playground:

Nothing exceptional to see here. It’s just a bunch of dumb patches to control the color of the background screen and its intensity. The latter can be modulated by pulses with different profiles, and also by the sound captured by the MacBook ’s microphone. The source composition is downloadable  .

Just for the sake of it, I’ve recorded a quick and dirty demo with my Canon 7D (set to 1080p, 25 fps and 1/50 shutter speed) and the fantastic Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8  :

Here is the video, which I edited with Kdenlive  :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8JN40Vq_do

The audio is sourced from Jamendo . It’s the track One Year written by Paolo Lunardi for his album Essential , and released under a Creative Common BY-SA v3.0 license (thus making my video subject to the same license).