Touch Designer Tuts, Generating Music in Logic & Quadraphonic Speaker Set up

Today I woke up dreaming about my final major project, it's safe to say I'm excited for the coming months and grinding work. Although that may sound sarcastic it's not! I got in early at the studio to play around with some Touch Designer. I believe this will be the most challenging part of my generative audio/visual environment. Since I want the image and the audio to be tightly synchronised it makes it even more challenging. I've also heard from my colleges on the Digital Music & Sound Art course that the MIDI  interfacing is still in a beta stage and isn't easy to use. Another worry of mine is switching between different kind of visuals. 
One way of creating some synchronisation between the audio is using audio to effect the visual, I did this in my practice 7 module. This was a team project and the visuals were out sourced. (More on that here). I did some of that today, and it was ok, you could tell the audio was having an effect but it was pretty delayed. I'll play around more with this since it could be an effective way of  manipulating the visuals. Here is some examples of the work I did today. To get myself going I followed a Matthew Regan tutorial. Although I don't fully understand it yet. Link > here <

When I got home I worked between two tasks:

Setting up PureData to communicate with Logic
And setting up Quadraphonic in my bedroom (I definitely don't have the room for it) 

At the beginning of my session I thought I was having some success with triggering MIDI in logic, I thought I was well on my way to getting it to work. I had some notes triggering a sampled marimba. I then set up my Quadraphonic system fairly quickly. It took me just under an hour. I then had ctlouts changing surround panner values. This was pretty effective. I up the metro and random object to give me values. And using the line object smoothed the transition from value to value. This moved the sound in the space very well. It inspired an idea for the colour yellow, I thought I could have to rhythmical elements chasing each other around the room. But I digress.
After getting the surround panning to work, when I was most hopeful, I hit what appeared to be an unbreakable brick wall. When I added in a second instrument channel and tried to input data from PureData many difficult bugs occurred. I could get one MIDI channel to play notes, but anymore than that and the notes cut in and out. Like they where phase canceling. But with MIDI notes. very weird. As well I couldn't send cltouts to more than one channel.  After sometime I decided to quit and move back to Ableton. I still wanted the surround, so I followed a tutorial by Eric Kuehnl, which shows you how to get surround in Ableton 9. View > here <This was effective, Although I didn't get around to programming any movement from PureData. That is on tomorrows agenda. 

Written by Jack Cleary