EDM...Visual Effects But With Glow Sticks

Intro

Well, I’m back into the swing of things. Before jumping back into my science articles, I wanted to discuss a branch of visual effects that needs more community love and support: EDM. It’s also an excellent avenue for CGI to work in if you ever get the chance.

How is EDM a branch of visual effects and computer animation well… We’ll dive into that soon. But first I need to thank the rave team down at Promise Cherry Beach in Toronto who, it turns out are just a bunch of retired visual effects people, and others who have worked with Derivitate Software projecting lights and sounds into trees and the beach every Sunday and Monday in the Toronto Summer. Thank you so much for sliding me into the DJ booths and teaching me how you operated the lasers. That was awesome.

This article focuses on the art and visuals created for EDM rather than the music and by no means covers the entire industry. It is also for those who like EDM but would like to explore it for “research purposes.”

Let’s get started.

History Of EDM

The history of EDM, or Electronic Dance Music, goes farther back than you think. Electronic music can be characterized as a genre of music that is produced using electronic, electromechanical, and digital instruments. Electronic music instruments can include electronic oscillators, the theremin, synthesizers, electronic pianos, electric guitars, vocals, or whatever the chosen artist feels like bringing on stage. Electronic music can be made from an extensive variety of resources, from electronic oscillators to diverse computer installations and software, to microprocessors. These sounds are recorded and edited on tape and then transformed and then played back and reproduced using loudspeakers and other instruments. EDM is one of the most popular musical genres on the globe.

Electronic Dance Music is a compilation of electronic music subgenres. Some of these are as follows:

Ambient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mehLx_Fjv_c
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-- Ambient music focuses on atmosphere and tonal textures rather than rhythm and structure. It surfaced in the 1970s when synthesizers were used to create experimental music. The term “ambient music” was reportedly coined by English producer Brian Eno.

Big room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlCL9z-cDy8
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--- Big room (or big room house) is one of the newer genres. Initially a subgenre of electro house, the big room rose around the early 2010s through acts such as Swedish House Mafia and Martin Garrix. It has minimal melodies and electro-house-style drops.

Chill-out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUjE9H8QlA4
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-- Chill-out can be characterized by slow rhythms, relaxed moods, and sometimes even jazzy or classical influences.

Deep house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM-BT9cijI4
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-- What classifies as Deep House is up for debate. It is influenced by House tracks of artists like Marshall Jefferson and Larry Heard from the ‘80s. It is a style of house music adopted with a lower tempo (bpm) and a more soulful feel through gospel-like vocals or Jazzy vibes in comparison to a “regular” house. However, it can also mean the commercialized form of house music of recent times. ‘Deep house,’ often upbeat, radio-friendly, and very summer-like, leans more toward pop-dance or electro-pop due to its frequent application in pop music.

Disco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dYWe1c3OyU
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-- Disco is where music styles such as rhythm and blues, funk, soul, and pop collide. It was popular in the 1970s and 1980s and was one of the first genres of electronic dance music to gain a following. Disco largely featured more acoustic instruments than electronically produced elements, but it was also one of the main influences for house music.

Drum and Bass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkjNL4dX-U4
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-- Commonly abbreviated to DnB, it originated in the U.K. in the 1990s. It is built on fast-paced breakbeats in non-standard rhythms and can use raw and heavy bass rips to achieve an aggressive sound. For instance, the liquid drum and bass(a subgenre) are gentler and melodic.

Dubstep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSeNSzJ2-Jw
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-- Often confused with drum and bass, dubstep is less fast-paced and generally not break-beat-like. It features unconventional rhythms and is widely known for a specific sound element: the wobble bass (the 'wub').

Electro House: https://www.traxsource.com/track/11760407/blade-extended-mix
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-- Electro house surfaced when electro, originally a fusion of funk, early hip-hop, and New York boogie, met in the house scene of the late 1990s. Electro house is defined by raw, prominent basslines and powerful kick drums, making it a pumped-up version of 'regular' house music.

Hardcore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leLiXABWg68
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-- Hardcore, supposedly going by the name of hardcore techno once, originated in the Netherlands in the 1990s and is arguably the hardest style in this list. It is incredibly fast-paced (160 to 200 beats per minute) and often described as violent by those who favor more delicate music. The true signature of hardcore lies in the kick drums, which are unrivaled in both intensity and the application of distortion effects.

Hardstyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsG_zDV83mo
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-- Hardstyle is one of the harder styles. It is more melodically oriented than hardcore, and certainly not as noise-heavy. It is somewhere in between hard techno and hardcore, but it also draws from trance music.

House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUVCQXMUVnI
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-- House music is the genre that began it all. It began in Chicago through artists such as Frankie Knuckles, who took over cities in the United States, such as Detroit and New York, Europe, and the rest of the world. There, it became one of the most prominent and popular genres within the dance music space.

Progressive House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C2KSaqm3so
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-- Progressive houses are subject to the same issues as Deep House. There are two different ways to describe it. It is sometimes defined in the style of music with the sound of artists such as Sasha and John Digweed, Eric Prydz, and Deadmau5. It also draws from the sound of early trance tracks. The other progressive house forms are radio-friendly vocals, simple song structures, and easy-to-listen-to melodies, which share traits with Big Room. This form of progressive house was the first to cross over into the pop realm. Some of the first examples of these tracks are songs like ‘Clarity’ from Zedd feat. Foxes, ‘Take Over Control’ from Afrojack feat. Eva Simons, and Avicii’s 'Wake Me Up'.

Techno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-GflRB0y4
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-- The foundations of the genre were largely created by Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, jointly known as the Belleville Three. With emphasis on atmosphere and an often extended build-up of the track, techno music has a rawer, less polished sound set than house music.

Trance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6120QOlsfU
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Trance music is all about the atmospheres, epic breakdowns, and melodies. It started as a minor subgenre within the house spectrum and shared traits with house, techno, new age, and synthesizer pop. The first tracks classified as trance emerged in the late 1980s, although the early 1990s is when the genre began to flourish. Artists such as Armin van Buuren, Chicane, DJ Tiësto, and Ferry Corsten helped trance music grow into one of the most popular genres within the music realm.

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Richard James Burgess would be the man to coin the phrase “EDM”, or Electronic dance music in the 1980s. Coining this phrase would place him at the front of the electronic music revolution. Born in London and raised in New Zealand, Burgess was drawn to percussion at an early age. By the time he was 15, Burgess was making enough money as a musician to pursue a full-time career. He would travel the globe and be attached to prominent record labels such as RCA and Capitol.

Burgess was different from other artists at the time as he mainly used synthesizers in his work. This began with the EMS Synthi A, an analog synthesizer and matrix pad built into a suitcase.

He later got his hands on devices like the ARP 2600 and the Roland MC8 and invented his instrument, the prototype of the SDS-5 (“described as a piece of wood with wires and components on it”). InIne formed a band known as Landscape, which was formed by Christopher Heaton, Andy Pask, Peter Thoms, and John L. Walters. The band was known for its early, synth-wave-era embrace of computer programming.

Walters played the lyrical, the world’s first electronic wind controller, while Heaton, Pask, and Thoms developed and mastered synthesizers that manipulated their acoustic instruments. “Avant-garde electronic stuff, 100% improvised,” Burgess would affirm. One of their tracks, “Einstein a Go-Go,” was the first computer-driven song to become a top-five hit in the U.K.

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In 1980, Landscape’s record titled “European Man” stated the now infamous phrase: “EDM; computer programmed to perfection for your listening pleasure.” The name for the genre was born.

Burgess may have been at the forefront of making the genre popular, but where the technique and music style originated was long before his time in the music scene.

A turning point for the overall music industry was the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alva Edison and Emile Berliner around the 1870s/1880s. Phonographs were the first means of recording and reproducing audio files, marking the beginning of the recording industry.

The genre originated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Emerging electronics allowed for experimentation with sounds and electronic devices. Several electronic instruments were developed, including the Telharmonium, an electrical organ developed in 1896.

From the late 1920s, the increased practicality of electronic instruments influenced composers such as Joseph Schillinger and Maria Schuppel. They were typically used within orchestras, and most composers wrote parts for the theremin that could be performed with string instruments. The Hammond organ, Trautonium, and the Ondes Martenot would also be developed, an early electronic device played with keyboards or a ring along a wire. These early innovations were first used for demonstrations and public performances as they were too complex, impractical, and incapable of creating a sound practically for music.
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The introduction of electrical recording in 1925 was followed by experimentation with record players. Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch composed several pieces in 1930 by layering recordings of instruments and vocals at adjusted speeds. In 1935, the first practical audio tape was invented. Influenced by these techniques, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in 1939 by adjusting the speeds of recorded tones.
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In 1948, musique concrète, a type of music composition, was invented in Paris, France by French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the Studio d'Essai at Radiodiffusion Française (RDF). The Musique concrète technique created tape collages or montages of recorded sounds. All these sounds produced by an individual and their environment were considered materials taken from ‘concrete’ means and situations. Therefore, music concrète was opposed to the use of oscillators as they were considered ‘artificial’ and ‘anti-humanistic’ but still used electric devices to record them.

The work in electronic music taking place in America during this time resulted from two projects undertaken by three composers at Columbia University: Otto Luening, John Cage, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. Between 1942 and 1958, Cage completed Williams Mix (1952) and Fontana Mix (1958) and formed The Music for Magnetic Tape Project along with other composers and members of the New York School. The emphasis of the project was on experimenting with the recording of electronic and natural sounds and combining them with instrumental music, dance, and visual arts.

The goal of the project led by Luening and Ussachevsky was to create a professional tape studio that would demonstrate the musical possibilities of tape as a medium. Joined by Milton Babbitt, the two composers established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, known as the Computer Music Center or CMC today, in 1959. This is the oldest center of electronic and computer music research in the USA. After 1958, the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois and the University of Toronto Studio were established in 1959.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, who worked in Schaeffer's studio in 1952, had a different idea of how sounds and music could be transformed and altered. So, softly after joining Schaeffer, he left and joined WDR Cologne's Studio for Electronic Music, established by Herbert Einer. His focus was on electronic sound modifications rather than tape manipulation. What he wanted to achieve, through sound alterations, filtering, and modulating, was electric acoustic compositions. This marked the birth of Elektronische Musik, a German branch of electronic music.

Music festivals featuring electronic instruments started to appear in the early 1900s. This mostly included electronic sounds used in experimental music, particularly tape and electroacoustic music, including the above instruments. Live electronic music expanded more in the 1950s, alongside the use of bass and electric guitar.

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Japanese electronic musical instruments started having a strong influence on the international music industry. Various Japanese manufacturers, such as AceTone, Korg, Matsushita, Roland, and Yamaha, were developing their versions of electronic music devices in the 1950s. These included percussion instruments, early drum machines, electric organs, and synthesizers.

The period of the 1960s was crucial for music festivals and their evolution into mass-cultural entertainment. With the postwar economic boom and the rise of the American car industry, festivals and other cultural events had become less elite and more accessible to a wider range of middle classes and even some working classes. Music festivals were also centered around various cultural matters popular among younger audiences, such as fashion, food, art, and literature. Through this music festivals started to become a valuable part of the popular culture of that time.

One of the first ‘pop-culture’ music festivals to be founded was the Monterey Pop Music Festival which was held in June 1967 in Monterey. This festival included stars, like Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, the Who, and Simon & Garfunkel. The greatest musical event of the 1960s was the legendary Woodstock festival which was organized on a dairy farm in upstate New York from 15th-18th August 1969 and attracted almost 500,000 people. The festival offered in total of 32 different performers, and those that were previously present at the Monterey festival.

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The late 1960s saw the rise of popular electronic music merge with other musical genres, especially pop and rock, which led to the establishment of new genres. Musicians of that time, such as the Beatles or the Beach Boys, started integrating electronic instruments, including the theremin or Mellotron, into their sound. Electronica was pioneered by the American duo Silver Apples and bands such as White Noise, which are known for adding oscillators and synthesizers to their psychedelic sound.

Mood synthesizers became particularly popular among progressive rock bands, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer as well. A whole new sub-genre of progressive rock was born in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s by this movement.

Electronic art music developed new-agent art music developed new-age ambient murky ambient dub, in the parent dub was pioneered by several Jamaican musicians such as King Tubby and later adopted by other international artists like Dreadzone, The Orb, and Ott.

After disco became highly popular in the 1970s, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of synth-pop, featuring the synthesizer. The sub-genre was greatly influenced by musicians, such as Ultravox, with the song ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (1977), Depeche Mode, with a track called ‘Dreaming of Me’ (1980), and New Order, with their song ‘Ceremony’ (1981).

Disco music aimed to move crowds of people on the dancefloor, using drum machines and electronic instruments to create synthesized rhythms. Popular disco music that helped to create the EDM scene included Donna Summer’s 1977 hit “I Feel Love,” which was written by Pete Bellotte and Giorgio Moroder, who would later collaborate with Daft Punk, and George McCrae's 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby,” which used a drum machine and Roland rhythm machine.

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Massive music festivals were also developing in the UK, too. Some of the most renowned pop festivals in the UK were The Isle of Wight (1967-present), Glastonbury Festival (1970-present) and Reading Festival (1971-present). The 1970 edition of the Isle of Wight exceeded the attendance at Woodstock, attracting more than 700,000 participants., international festivals were also established in the 1970s, including the Canadian Strawberry Fields Festival (1970), the Sunbury Pop Festival in Australia (1972-1975), or Festival Rock Y Ruedas De Avándaro in Mexico (1971).

Synth music, or synthpop, was developed alongside house music and electro music during the “post-disco” era in the ‘’80s. Music of this era began to be produced in the mainstream music industry in Europe as EDM became more sophisticated with the ever-changing technological advancements. Drum machines and synthesizers were used more heavily after the 1970s. Paired with the use of computers, electronic music took off as an accessible art form that could be replicated and transformed by anyone with musical experience and a computer. Music produced during this time included hits like A-ha’s “Take On Me” and the song that would come to be recognized as one of the first house records.

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Synth-pop continued through the 1980s, moving closer to dance music, with acts including Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and The Communards. In 1987, British DJ Danny Rampling started organizing a weekly party called Shoom in one of London's fitness clubs. Soon, such parties, taking place illegally, spread to other European countries, including Germany. In Frankfurt, this time, a sub-genre, trance, was born.

Artists such as Lime and Men Without Hats from Canada, Propaganda, Sandra and Modern Talking from Germany, Yello from Switzerland, and Telex from Belgium became popular. The sound of synth-pop also became the defining feature of Italo-disco. Bands including Van Halen with their track ‘Jump’ (1983) and Europe with ‘The Final Countdown’ (1986) became instant hits.

The genres of Acid House, Dance, and Techno were all established in Germany and the UK. They then spread to the rest of Europe before traveling to America and landing in the Detroit Techno scene. Detroit techno had many early pioneers, but one main one was Juan Atkins, who in 1981 partnered with Rik Davis as Cybotron and issued the single “Alleys of Your Mind.” Shortly after releasing an album, Enter (1983), the duo split up, at which point Atkins started his label, Metroplex, and began releasing 12-inch vinyl singles under the name Model 500. The sound that emerged from the Detroit scene was an abstract instrumental funk; Saunderson often used vocalists and had his biggest hits with the soul-influenced duo Inner City. It became formalized as a style after Atkins named a track “Techno Music.” which was released in 1988.

In the 1980s the invention of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), a technical standard that describes and standardizes a communication protocol, the digital interface, and electrical connectors between various electronic musical instruments, computer software, and other related audio gadgets for recording, editing, and playing music was created. MIDI was completed in 1983 and the technology made the development of electronic sound easier.

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By 1988, acid house became the most prominent music genre in the UK, mostly in nightclubs in London, Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham. However, conflicts with local police and attracting people exceeding the capacities of their venues, ‘raves’ were moved to the countryside near the big cities, taking place in various outdoor locations and closed industrial sites.

The official era of open-air raves didn’t last very long. In 1992-1993, the British government passed new laws to ban them effectively. While these events didn’t stop the local promoters from organizing them, these raves moved back to already established clubs or spread to the European continent, where no laws prohibiting raves existed.

The 1990’s rave culture would form out of techno music, house music, hardcore rave (hardstyle), dub, trance, and drum and bass. In the ’90s, EDM was still breaking into the mainstream, and it began to rise in popularity, especially in Europe. It was then that the rave scene began to grow into what it is today. Popular songs included the British group Orbital’s single Chime and their single “Halcyon On and On.”

This music was popularized under the name “electronica” during the 1990s. Bands like Underworld, Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy, and The Chemical Brothers came from England and had a massive impact. In the U.S., “Detroit techno,” or techno that seemed to originate in Detroit in the late ’80s and ’90s grew in popularity. Detroit techno was pioneered by the “Belleville Three,” including Derrick Mayr, who produced music under the names Mayday and Rhythim is Rhythim.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened in 1989, just on the verge of the 1990s. The political events happening in Berlin, Germany, unconsciously, impacted the development of above-ground electronic music festivals. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the summer of that year, a group of 150 people, organized by the Berlin underground, took part in a political demonstration in the form of a musical parade that was held in Kurfürstendamm. Officially billed as a political march, the parade was the beginning of Love Parade, a massive electronic dance music festival, and techno parade. The following year, after the fall of the Wall, the Love Parade took place again, this time attracting around 2000 people.

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By 1997, the Love Parade was attended by more than a million partygoers. It had changed its location to the nearby Tiergarten Park, with the parade route ending at the Siegessäule, a ‘Victory Column’. The free-access music festival featured stages as well as floats with music, DJs, and dancers stirring through the audience and was held annually in Berlin from 1989-2003. The Love Parade was canceled due to funding difficulties. Eventually, the parade saw its short revival in 2007 when it was organized in the Ruhr region, centered around the cities of Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, and Gelsenkirchen. The last Love Parade took place in 2010 in the city of Duisburg and was marked by a fatal disaster from attendees dying from suffocation as they were trying to leave the ramp leading to the festival area. The tragedy caused the deaths of 21 people and at least 500 more were injured. The organizers decided to cancel the festival permanently. However, in 2022, the equivalent of Love Parade was revived under the name of Rave The Planet.

Alongside Love Parade, Mayday (1991-present) and the Swiss festival Street Parade (1992-present) were the biggest electronic music festivals in Europe throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. City-based electronic music festivals were trendy in the 1990s and were eventually seen as lucrative sources of income and tourism. Other most popular city-based festivals of that time were Time Warp in Mannheim (1994-present), Sónar in Barcelona (1994-present), I Love Techno in Ghent (1995-present), Awakenings in Rotterdam and Amsterdam (1997-present) or Hradhouse in Boskovice (1998-2010).

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In the early 2000s, the ‘urban arts festival’ model was the go, and more festivals were being established, including Club Transmediale in Berlin (1999-present), EXIT in Novi Sad (2000-present), MUTEK in Montreal (2000-present), and Decibel Festival in Detroit (2003-present). Non-urban festivals were organized, too, such as Destiny/World Electronic Music Festival near Toronto (1995-2012), Kazantip in Ukraine (1992-2013), Boom in Portugal (1997-present), and Melt! in Germany (1998-present).

In the 2000s, EDM became popular in the U.S. thanks to international DJs and music producers drawing attention to the genre and a techno-pop 1998 album by Madonna called Ray of Light. From there, producers like Tiësto, Daft Punk, and David Guetta rose to popularity. In the early 2000s, dubstep was also introduced to the U.S. music industry through artists like Skrillex.

The genre during this time was strongly shaped by technological advances and higher accessibility of technology and musical software. Many technological innovations introduced in the new millennium, such as CDs or DVDs, the digital audio workstation (DAW) Ableton Live (2001), or the studio emulation Reason (2000) shaped music. These devices provided less complex, more cost-effective, alternatives to traditional hardware-based production studios. Ableton Live is considered one of the first music applications to automatically beat-match a song. DJs have widely used shows and live performances for composing, recording, and mastering records.

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Today, EDM is often characterized by remixes and original sound mixes, produced by DJs like The Chainsmokers, Steve Aoki, Martin Garrix, and others. EDM is used by a large majority of pop and hip-hop artists, including Coldplay, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Drake, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Alessia Cara, and countless others.

The new millennium is marked by the continuous growth of EDM in the US, such as dubstep promoted by Skrillex. Daft Punk changed the game and the global perception of electronic dance music when they launched their 2006-2007 worldwide tour at the Coachella festival near Indio, California.

Then came the global establishment of EDM festivals in the first decade of the 21st century, taking the format of outdoor mega-events. The most popular are Tomorrowland in Belgium (2005), Electric Daisy Festival in Las Vegas, US (1991), Ultra Music Festival in Miami (1999), Airbeat One Festival in Germany (2002), and Balaton Sound in Hungary (2007).

As of today, 2023, the industry's value has grown in 16 countries, led by market share gains mostly in the UK and Germany. Recorded electronic music grew by up to 18%, with physical format sales growing for the first time in 20 years, and artists’ and DJ earnings went up by 111%.

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Norman McLaren

This might seem like an odd transition from EDM to talking about the people at the National Film Board of Canada. However, EDM and the corresponding visuals that it is known for weren’t created together. Instead, “EDM visuals” or electronic music visuals were created through multiple experiences by multiple people. One of those people who experimented with audio and visuals was Norman McLaren.

For those who have never heard of him, McLaren is a National Hero. There are no heroes in VFX or animation, with a few exceptions. McLaren is an exception to that rule because he helped create foundational techniques that countless animation and art industries use, shaped Canadian Culture and Canada’s global image, and countlessly promoted love, anti-war sentiments, inclusivity, and peace throughout his lifetime. He created keyframe animation, pixilation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, and graphical sound techniques. When he died of a heart attack in 1987, 400 people from the NFB showed up to honor him, and every single newspaper across Canada reported his loss. His boyfriend, producer, and long-time partner, Guy Glover, would die of a broken heart just over a year later. He was and still is the most honored animator in Canadian history.

Born in Scotland in 1914, McLaren studied interior design at the Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1936. Mclaren started making animations as a teenager in Scotland; he would lie back with his eyes closed, listen to music on the radio, and watch dancing shapes projected by his mind. He started making films, always with “a musical script” instead of dialogue, and attempting a “visual translation of the music”. During his time there, he became interested in motion pictures and experimental film, leading him to set up a production group for himself and his fellow students. As he couldn’t afford a camera, he instead washed off the emulsion from a cinema’s discarded 35mm reel and painted directly onto each frame.

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The visuals of Colour Cocktail, his first amateur silent short, which led to his discovery by documentarist John Grierson, were so well matched to a gramophone record that people were convinced the sound and image had been pre-synced. Grierson went on to found the National Film Board and hire Norman Mclaren because of the extreme talent he saw.

In his early 20s, while working at Grierson’s British GPO Film Unit, McLaren noticed that knife marks on a film’s soundtrack played back as interesting sounds. McLaren would then scratch-compose a soundtrack for a film, but his producer rejected it at the time.

A few years later, after emigrating to New York, he animated both the images and sounds of his vibrant handmade shorts for the Guggenheim, including Dots (1940) and Loops (1940), to avoid paying for music rights.

McLaren would then relocate to the National Film Board of Canada, where he spent most of his career. During his first years there, he founded Studio A and oversaw a series of proto-music videos set to folk songs. Later, he would work with musicians such as Pete Seeger, Oscar Peterson, Ravi Shankar, and Glenn Gould. but he told friends of his plans “eventually to be able to compose my music… I’ve had no formal training – but I know I could compose.”

He would continue to use actual physical film to create music. McLaren used animated, electronic, optical-graphical music, like “a small orchestra of clicking, thudding, buzzing and drumlike timbres.” His work was and still is often classified as ‘synthetic’ music, as it didn’t imitate instruments, as a keyboard synthesizer does. Other filmmakers, including Claude Jutra and the Whitney brothers, would also try their hand at animated sound but McLaren developed it further than any other.

He would mark a filmstrip’s soundtrack with pencils, pens, brushes, razor blades, and other tools. He was often freehanded. McLaren controlled tone through shape, volume through thickness, and pitch through the number of his slashes into the film strips. One result was the Morse code-like percussion of Mosaic (1965).

At the Film Board, McLaren was inspired by musicians such as Maurice Blackburn and Louis Applebaum. McLaren was invited to join the National Composers’ Association and lecture at Juilliard and the Acoustical Society of America. John Cage, who helped found some of the first electronic music experiments in the U.S.A., would play McLaren’s music at his New York concerts.

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With filmmaker Evelyn Lambart, McLaren developed a deck of pitch cards, a ‘keyboard’ that allowed the exact musical pitches of a piano to be photographed onto a soundtrack. The blips and whirrs of his hand-etched scores created this card-animated music, which resembled synthesizer, 8-bit, or digital music decades in advance. He first used his cards for Now Is the Time (1951), a 3D film with a parallel multidimensional audio system of independent speakers that wrapped around the audience. He used the same cards for Neighbours (1952), his most famous film.

One of Mclaren’s other films was called Blinkity Blank. Blinkity Blank employed many techniques of shapes drawn directly onto film. It showed everyday household objects like fruit and umbrellas and a rough narrative involving a bird attempting to escape its cage. Blinkity made great use of sound and used a combination of musical sequences and sound effects created by McLaren in the film to convey its message. McLaren described how one note of his “animated sound” would require 50 individual lines on his 35mm film, and its pitch and intensity were adjustable through the shape and size of the strokes.

Synchromy (1971), the last of McLaren’s many films, could be best described as a moving kaleidoscope on screen, and the images presented correspond to the soundtrack. The part of the filmstrip that contained the audio, McLaren colored, multiplied, and reorganized to look synchronized viewing. Filming him writing the ‘perpetual motion’ tune on a piano for Synchromy, photographing pitch cards to match it and finally transforming the soundtrack into visuals, the BBC documentary The Eye Hears, the Ear Sees (1971) documented this and explained that “this man is doing something that no one in the world has ever done before: he’s writing a film on the piano”.

A National Film Board Short entitled Pen Point Percussion was a “hand-drawn sound introduction” to Norman Mclaren's work that would be documented. It covered the fundamental processes of how sound is captured into film, providing an excellent glimpse into sound processes for film.

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As the Narrator states:

“Well, if a sound makes a pattern in a film, a pattern in a film will make a sound. You can even create your Sounds by drawing directly on the film. Norman McLaren the motion picture artist has been making some hand-drawn sounds, and now he's going to hear them for the first time. Played on the movie Lola, a sort of miniature movie projected it's not just guesswork the sound of any of these patterns of lines can be calculated the size controls the loudness……”

“That's simple enough, and then there's the tone quality. It's controlled by the shape of the marks. This series of thin, straight lines gives a sharp rather unpleasant sound but these round dots are a bit smoother. The marks can be any shape you like. Now, how about this? Using the brush, Norman tries to make a row of small triangles with these sharp angular forms. What would they sound like? The distance the lines are apart controls pitch, with the lines far apart being a low-pitched, medium, and high note.”

“Now, what can they be used for these hand-drawn sounds? Norman McLaren finds they're a Perfectly Natural accompaniment to some of his hand-drawn Motion Pictures. Each movement of the screen can have its own specially designed sound-making movies. This way, the artist has direct personal control at every stage of the film's production. Sound and picture are planned and closely related as they are drawn. Now Norman is checking to ensure that each bit of sound is perfectly matched to its accompanying screen action. Finally, the picture and the sound will be printed together at one length of the film, and color will be added during the process.”

Even though Norman’s processes were opposite to how we sync graphics for sound now, his processes are still worth learning.

Video Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxZe4hL73m8

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The Toronto Connection

TouchDesigner

Let’s talk about one of the most used software packages in the EDM world: Touchdesigner.

TouchDesigner is software created by DeDerivative, a company in Toronto, Canada. It generates visuals in "procedural" and "node-based" and has real-time capabilities. Derivative was founded in 2000 by Greg Hermanovic(Founder, President, and CTO), Rob Bairos(Head of R&D), and Jarrett Smith(Product Architect).

If you are familiar with the history of Sidefx Houdini, you might have heard of Touchdesigner once or twice. Like Houdini, TouchDesigner was developed from a software package called PRISMS, developed at Omnibus Computer Graphics in Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York from 1984 to 1987. When Omnibus collapsed and went bankrupt, PRISMS was purchased from Omnibus liquidators Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic, who formed a company called Side Effects. It was a pure chance of luck that they acquired the software and its accompanying SGI computer. Greg Hermanovic served as CEO and Director of Strategic Technology of Sidefx until 2000. Hermanovic's background was different from that of the traditional route of CGI. Before working in CGI Software, he worked for six years in aerospace, developing simulations for The Canadarm and various flight simulators.

Side Effects developed and licensed PRISMS till 1998, when Houdini became the primary package that clients started to swarm around. PRISMS was used in over 200 feature films and won its first Academy Award in 1998. Houdini’s first release was in 1995. In 2003, Side Effects Software received its second Academy Award for the innovations within Houdini, and the Software has been used in well over a thousand productions and countless video games.

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In FX Guide’s Side Effects Software – 25 Years Retrospective, written by Mike Seymour in 2012, it’s clear that PRISMs received much love. “From the earliest days, Side Effects threw good parties. As one original user, Harry Magiros (who went on to be an Australian reseller for Side Effects), recalls, “Greg would throw these amazing parties with interactive stuff happening – all live – which back then was unheard of, today of course you can do it with a PS3. But it was such a great family atmosphere at the first user groups. We all had Greg and Kim’s home phone numbers, and they never minded us calling in the middle of the night if we had problems. While the other companies were spending a fortune on marketing, [Side Effects] got to know everyone personally, which was a great move then.”

Greg Hermanovic left Sidefx to form Derivative in 2000, working from the most recently released version of Houdini 4.1. Derivative's first product, TouchDesigner, spanned from TouchDesigner 007 to 017 from 2002 to 2007. In 2008, Derivative released its next-gen TouchDesigner package 077 in beta form, which rewrote the software, incorporating OpenGL workflows, compositing and effects, a new user interface, and other additional features.

Like SideFx’s Houdini, TouchDesigner is based on procedural workflows and has Operators. Operators are the building blocks of a TouchDesigner project. These objects are represented as user interface nodes and connected to create procedural effects and animation. TouchDesigner was also built to implement visual programming languages for easier user interaction and lightweight scripting.

Touchdesigner’s nodes also share several names similar to Houdini’s. These include COMP, Components representing 3D objects and other operators; TOPs, Texture Operators for 2D animations; and CHOP, Channel operators for motion, audio, animation, and control signals. Then there are SOPs, Surface operators for the native objects and points in 3D space; MAT, nodes for applying materials; and DAT, data operators for plain text, scripts, XML, and tables.

TouchDesigner's other features included rendering and compositing workflows, scalable architecture, video, and audio in and out, multi-display support, video mapping, animation and control channels, custom control panels, and a 3D engine.

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TouchDesigner 007 was launched at the end of 2001 on December 17th. Introduced as the Touch 101 product family, this included TouchDesigner 007, Which cost $1199. TouchPlayer 007, a player of Touch artworks, was Free, and TouchMixer 007 cost around $199 for virtual DJs who wished to use the software. TouchMixer 007 was added to TouchPlayer, allowing it to use MIDI in/out, record/edit mixes, and replace textures.

The first year and a half of Derivative’s existence was spent setting up the company. Much of this time was spent creating a website and brand and finding employees to help. Rob Bairos started work on adapting Houdini into a real-time engine, giving inputs for MIDI controllers and essential interface-building tools for live performances. In contrast, Jarrett Smith worked on the design of new features. The other goal for the first few years was building the community and getting clients excited about the new products. The team created an artwork section for their site where artists could upload their files and upload tracks for presets in the software they had designed.

Some of Touchdesigner’s first work was for Canadian rock icons RUSH for their North American Vapor Trails tour in 2002. As well as a collaboration with Smirnoff Toronto and Warp Records LA. Derivative produced a unique visual synth for their event, and Touch artists “Topcat” (Greg Hermanovic), “Mordka” (Jarrett Smith), and Christian Smith ran visuals alongside techno pioneers Derrick May and Richard Devine.

Touch 008 was released on February 28, 2002, and Touch 009 on April 2, 2002. Many of the updates revolved around bug fixes and new artwork. Jarrett Smith's label Mordka released the first Synth with a music track and a recorded performance mix: Niosumed. A Niosumed Complete Walkthrough was featured in 3D World magazine. Another feature added for Touch 009 was the release of a Touch plugin for Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator4, allowing you to embed Touch synths into browsers.

Touch 012 was released on Oct 1, 2002. Touch 010 and 011 were internal builds and were never publicly released. Alongside its release was TouchArt CD, a collection of all the artwork from the website's catalog for $19.95. It included its installer and Flash interface to navigate and launch the artwork. Touch 013 was released on Jan 13, 2003, followed by a major software update on April 10, 2003, in Touch 015. This included features like dual monitor support for the first time, offscreen rendering, Quicktime movie support for playback as textures, and support of new Nvidia and ATI drivers.

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In the summer of 2004, the new PRADA flagship store opened in Aoyama, Tokyo. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and Working alongside the architects, Derivative integrated five real-time architectural projections onto the walls and ceiling of the building. This was one of the first projection mapping projects done with TouchDesigner.

At the 5th edition of MUTEK Montreal, Jarrett Smith completed and led work for the beginning of Plastikman’s world tour. Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) wanted to control the entire show from his console, a custom MIDI controller dubbed ‘CTRL LIVE’ built by his dad. Because of this, Team Derivative had to “hack” the Ableton Live 3 and build a bi-directional audio-visual control system between Live and Touch to get the system to work with Plastikman’s console. The show succeeded, but the prep had to overcome several hurdles.

The show's beginning had the most challenging content: a satellite image of the Detroit-Windsor area was loaded into Touch as a huge texture, and then it slowly zoomed in over the first track. The piece crashed frequently because of the memory requirements. In the show, everything worked smoothly until 3 minutes into the show, and then everything went black. After minutes of struggling, a camera shutter closed, preventing the projections from being projected to the audience.

In December 2004, Derivative released Touch 017. Some highlights in 017 were a Keyframe editor live video input and its movie file format, .tmv (Touch Movie file), with a converter to encode it. Touch 017 was the final version of Touch tools in this era. After its release, there would be a long break before Derivative’s next software release.

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In 2014, TouchDesigner 88 (build 11600) would support the Oculus Rift.

However, Derivative kept TouchDesigner up to date with all the latest tools and flexibility it needed to survive. In June 2017, they made TouchDesigner 099 available on Windows and macOS. TouchDesigner 099 would add support for the latest SDI video cards from AJA, Bluefish, and Blackmagic up to 4K and 12G, with low latency, high frame rate, and deep pixel depth. Physically-based Rendering was also implemented during this time, as was Compositing improvement and Ableton Sync support.

The choices for getting video between TouchDesigner and other systems included Syphon/Spout and streaming over IP of H.264, Newtek NDI, and HAP video. TouchDesigner’s most famous component, Kantan Mapper, was also fully re-engineered to map video onto shapes.

Most recently, TouchDesigner 2023 was released. 2023 brings considerable improvements in device and sensor support, timecode, and other features to help the software work in broadcast and production environments. The new software improvements include new operators, a Bloom TOP for bloom effects, a GLSL COMP, an NVIDIA Upscaler TOP for integrated upscaling, and an overhauled Engine COMP. It also now includes Expanded OAK-D camera support (or stereophonic images, depth sensing, and IR night vision: ass well as Machine learning tracking capabilities and the Body Track CHOP for NVIDIA RTX GPUs. And we can’t forget the lasers…2023 also included Integration for Mo-Sys Startracker and Laser devices.

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In July of 2023, TouchDesigner integration with Unreal Engine 5 would be possible within the software. TouchDesigner release – 2022.33910 would work alongside the latest GitHub build of the TouchEngine-UE plugin (1.2.0) to provide this new integration of the two tools. The only downside of TouchEngine is that it does not work with Non-Commercial licenses. CHOPs in Unreal would work in the same way as CHOPs in TouchDesigner. This meant that users could work with samples, channels, by names or indices, and CHOP objects directly within the engine.

Following TouchDesigner 2023, Derivative announced Touch would now have a promising new update that would add POPs for GPU-powered 3D operations. It’s its own set of nodes for simulations of everything from fog to cloth and collisions. POPs in TouchDesigner are Point Operators, a set of GPU-accelerated operators that manipulate 3D materials. That joins Surface Operators (SOPs, which are CPU-bound), Texture Operators (TOPs), and Channel Operators (CHOPs) inside the software package.

Just like how Sidefx hosts HUGs(Houdini User Groups), Touchdesigner(Team Derivative) also hosts many workshops on how to use their software successfully in the music scene.

For example, their TouchDesigner and Ableton Live workshop hosted on March 24, 2023, from London’s Music Hackspace. They were led by TouchDesigner artist and educator Bileam Tschepe aka elekktronaut, and presentations from Grigory Gromov (generative AV systems), Stanislav Glazov (interactive music in TouchDesigner), and Roberto Teran (an interactive waterfall). This presentation was about CHOPs, combining Touchdesigner with other software such as Houdini, and using the VST CHOP for some examples.

Another partnership was with The Interactive & Immersive HQ on September 7th, 2021, to launch a beginner series on making expressive media with TouchDesigner. The series highlights the basics of operators and various other music functions.

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In July 2023, Derivative will launch its new TouchDesigner Curriculum in partnership with SudoMagic. This educational resource started with 80+ units of materials and lessons for the community to enjoy and learn from. These included form videos, files, written documentation, and downloads.

Touchdesigner can also work with other digital audio workstations (DAW) and music production software such as Bitwig Studio. This is useful for users who wish to use Bitwig as a sound, music, and audio mixing engine and then export their creations to Touchdesigner. This can be done with TDBitwig, which includes tools such as bitwigSong for transport/arranger communication (including timeline cues), bitwigTrack for bidirectional volume/mute/solo controls and control rate amplitude envelopes, and bitwigClip and bitwigClipSlot for bidirectional access to color, loop length, quantization, plus launching ability, playback control, and clip events with callbacks.

As of 2024, Team Derivative is still running its tech magic and keeping an active community involvement. The most recent was a presentation in Brooklyn, New York, at a Pataphysics show in February 2024. Showing off GeoSynth, an experimental audio synthesizer in TouchDesigner (and a little bit of Houdini) that repurposes the point coordinates of objects as raw audio samples. GeoSynth is a prototype instrument, a digital audio synthesizer that uses 3D objects as the source input for real-time audio synthesis. The idea is that the sounds can be sculpted visually by manipulating the form of each object and creating an animation in perfect synch with the audio but in the opposite manner than the typical audio-driven approach. It is very similar to what NormanMcLarenn did all those years ago, except it is the 3D version.

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Bill Buxton

For those unfamiliar with Bill Buxton's works, he is one of the pioneers of computer engineering in Toronto, let alone Canada. Although Buxton’s work covers a variety of larger subject matters regarding computer and human interactions, psychology between humans and computers, and various computer software engineering, his work is worth mentioning here. As Chief Scientist, Buxton also worked for the legendary Alias Wavefront corporation that made the one and only Alias and then the infamous Maya 3D animation tools. (1994-2002) Buxton is now completing work with the Mircosoft corporation.

Born in 1949, Bill Buxton's early research paved the way for the trackpads and touch screens that are ubiquitous today, which is why his work is so relevant in the electronic music field. The more interactive music is, the more connections we can derive from it. His 1985 paper on the capacitive multi-touch tablet was the first ever in the peer-reviewed literature to discuss a multi-touch device. He holds over 20 patents on these and other techniques.

Buxton was introduced to HCI (Human-computer interaction) in the early 1970s while studying music at Queen’s University. He would then participate in developing digital music systems at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. There, he would be introduced to the world of computer animation through the work of Peter Foldes, an NFB computer animator best known for his work on Hunger (La Faim) 1974 and Metadata 1971.

Buxton also has a unique background as a composer and performer. In 1975, he arrived in Canada at the invitation of Leslie Mezei as an informal "Artist in Residence" in the Dynamic Graphics Lab (Also known as DGP) which he co-directed at The University of Toronto. Buxton didn’t have much of a technical background in computers at this time but did have a robust skill set in electronic and computer music. This experience is precisely what DGP needed. In 1978, Buxton earned his Master of Science in computer science.

Buxton has been awarded four honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Toronto in 2013. In 2024, Buxton would also be presented with the highest honor of the country, becoming an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2011, he received the first annual Grand Canadian Digital Media Pioneer Award, recognizing his work pioneering multi-touch systems and novel user interface designs for computer music systems. He has also been named one of the top five designers in Canada by Time Magazine and one of the first dozen recipients of ACM SIGCHI’s most prestigious honor, a Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the field of HCI.

Ron Baecker, Leslie Mezei, and the chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, K.C.Smith, would work alongside Buxton to launch his endeavors off the ground at the university. The Structured Sound Synthesis Project (SSSP) was born out of this. Buxton also ran the Input Research Group (IRG) at U of T. The project was based in the Computer Systems Research Institute, received funding from 1976 to 1977, and existed until 1984. During this time, SSSP would build one of the world’s first portable digital synthesizers and many other user interfaces for music, which are now commonly used worldwide.

One of the other inventions of SSSP was a 6-voice digital synthesizer to make the sounds controlled in real-time via a DEC LSI-11 microcomputer. Two project engineers, Tom Duff and Rob Pike, wrote a real-time package that let it run as a slave to a PDP-11/45 minicomputer, which ran an early version of UNIX. The LSI-11 communicated with a UNIX machine via some dual-port memory using a modification to UNIX written by Bill Reeves.

This synthesizer would then be demoed, played in concerts, and modified as a stand-alone microcomputer. This involved laying the control panel on the screen like a spreadsheet and controlling the cells with a tablet and other graphical controllers. This synthesizer did not have MIDI controls as they had not been invented yet and ran off C code.

Buxton has also written several books and scientific papers, including his 2007 book Sketching User Experiences, a major work in the theory and practice of holistic design.

From 1989-94 he traveled between Toronto, where he was Scientific Director of the Ontario Telepresence Project, and Palo Alto, California, where he was a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC. From 1998-2004, Bill was on the board of the Canadian Film Centre, and from 1998-99 chaired a panel to advise the Premier of Ontario on developing long-term policy to foster innovation through the Ontario Jobs and Investment Board. In the fall of 2004, he became a part-time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design(OCAD). Then, he moved on to the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto as a visiting professor.

It’s hard to condense all of Buxton’s work into a complete summary of his achievements. I highly recommend checking out his website below to explore all of the developments he has contributed to the world of electronic music and computers:
https://www.billbuxton.com/

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Artist Spotlight

We can now start to talk about the various EDM artists of Toronto. There are so many that it is hard to count, but let’s look at some that feature the incredible computer graphics packages created here in Canada in their acts. One that awe-struck me was Deadmau5, and it was one of my first EDM concerts ever.

There was something breathtaking about being ushered into the dark, closed-off room of Rebel Toronto and then blasted with psychedelic images and lasers of rotating mouse head visuals until being forced out into the cold weather of February at 6 a.m. It was the equivalent of seeing fireworks for the first time.

It won’t be right not to mention one of Ontario’s most famous EDM artists, Deadmau5. Joel Zimmerman, better known as DeadMau5, is a six-time Grammy nominee who produces progressive house-electro-house music. Some of his hits include "Ghosts 'n' Stuff," "Hi Friend," and "Strobe." Arguably, the best part about his shows is the visuals and how Zimmerman attempts and succeeds in elevating his show to the next level.

Here is a brief breakdown of his work and the artist(s), tools, and visuals he has recently created.

Reza Ali was one of the artists who provided visuals for DeadMau5’s Meowingtons Hax 2011/2012 tour. Ali created the audio-synced visuals using custom software mixed with C++ and openFrameworks. Ali built an application that would output generative visuals, and these visuals would act as a mask for the pre-rendered content. In addition, the generative masks make the content midi-mappable. This meant that if Deadmau5′s toggled a button or moved a fader up and down it would reflect that in the show’s visuals. His app also had to pixel map the visuals so they displayed perfectly on Deadmau5′s LED stage setup. This setup consisted of two stealth LED wedges, an LED back wall, 9 small cubes (with LED panels on each side of the cubes), and the main cube (with large LED panels on each visible side).

Ali dubbed the application “Rezanator,” and it would output images consisting of five visual layers that then could be run in a composition of each other or one layer at a time. Each layer generated a unique-looking mask. The first layer would be a “blackout layer” for partially or completely hiding images, followed by a “white out layer,” showing pre-recorded visuals. These two layers were then followed by a “dynamic mask layer,” which produced simple squares and rectangles that would change in size. It also controlled the oscillation of the images at different rates and offset them.

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2011 was also the year where Cube v1 would be debuted on tour. Cube v1 was a massive LED-covered static cube projecting visuals into the audience. The cube also served as a platform and DJ booth. The cube had 36 tiles, totaling over 2800 individual F11 LEDs. It had a 1600 x 1200 native resolution and could display virtually any color. The opening motion graphics sequence was an old-school simulation of Super Mario but with a deadmau5 character trying to beat Mario to the castle.

Zimmerman would keep control of all the visuals and matching sounds through his interactive mouse helmet. The helmet came in two different versions, one completely covered with LEDs and another simpler one with neon-lined edges. The neon one weighed over eleven pounds. The LED model weighed almost three times as much—the LED helmet contained over 1,000 individual diodes alone.

In both helmets, a camera up front showed a view of what was going on outside since the entire helmet was completely solid, and there weren't any eye holes. It had a set of color video goggles on the inside that displayed whatever the camera saw, so all interaction with knobs and sliders had to be dealt with from a different perspective. Eight fans were contained around the back to keep Zimmerman’s head cool while spinning tracks. The LED one had six on the rear and two in the neck area to stimulate air circulation.

The central server output signals to another box loaded with Pixel Mad, a software designed for digital signage. Data then flows through a router that breaks the content into separate windows for each tile. Each track had 15-16 video levels for motion graphics. One person in the front of the house controlled the system and linked the graphics to whatever track was playing. The entire production was designed by Martin Phillips, who was also responsible for creating the visual effects in Daft Punk productions.

In 2017, Zimmerman would unveil Cube 2.1, which traveled with him on his tour for his sixth Studio Album. The show's visuals were created with Maxon Cinema 4D and built with the help of over 40 people and with Tait Towers, an entertainment engineering company. This version of The Cube was 33% larger than its predecessor and had moving parts, which included a three-axis motor. The cube played multiple loops of animation over 600 frames long. Some of the visuals were tied to specific songs, and the animations had their special pipeline for producing them.

Zimmerman approaches visuals like all his music in a “jam session.” For Cube 2.1, he compiles over 300 clips, which he and his associates refine over a few months. Then, for each approved clip, he creates four or five variations.

In an article with LiveDesign in 2017, Zimmerman also mentioned his software of choice is Sidefx Houdini, as he preferred its procedural workflows. The skill set he developed from the software helped him jump into Cinema 4D faster.

Projection mapping the visuals was the next step in making Cube 2.1 work. For the DeadMau5 tour, the images had to have a resolution of at least 768x768 pixels. The visuals also could not look flat, so they needed to work from different perspectives depending on where viewers were watching the stage. Zimmerman then took 3D models or scans of his stage, broke it down, and modeled LED panels around certain perspectives of the crowd. Zimmerman then rendered his final images in C4D’s OpenGL renderer and Octane.

Cube v3 would be a whole different matter. Presented in 2019, it was a different endeavor and required different software skills. For his 2019 tour, Deadmau5 would write away custom code and visuals in hotel rooms using Derivatives TouchDesigner. This visuals would include images of Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and deadmau5’s signature “mau5head” logo to the tune of hits like “Faxing Berlin,” “Raise Your Weapon” and “Ghosts N Stuff.” With the Cube v3, Zimmerman could cue up visuals in real-time, leaving space for spontaneity during sets and custom retimes visuals when he felt like switching the setup.

In 2020, Zimmerman would also assist in producing the visuals for the earworm song of the summer Saint JHN’s Roses for their performance at The Billboard Music Awards. Zimmerman made custom 3D designs that involved the use of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

In 2024, Deadmau5 also dipped his toes into virtual reality and teamed up with Soundscape to perform a series of exclusive virtual concerts on the platform. This performance included spatial audio, psychedelic visuals, and a 30-meter-tall Deadmau5 avatar.

Soundscape is an interactive audio website that allows you to create your own and mix audio with matching visuals depending on which genre you enjoy. It now supports Unreal Engine 5. The website was originally launched in 2017 as an app for the Burning Man Festival.

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The Tech, The Wizards, and Their Work

Other artists besides Deadmau5 are doing amazing visual work. One of them is Eric Prydz. You're missing out if you’ve never seen 3D holograms projected over your head or someone DJing in an “Iron Man” holographic sphere. For the VFX artist watching, it's a brainwashing-like experience. My first experience was at Veld 2024 on a Friday evening after being bullied into spending $200 on tickets. In the middle of Toronto’s Downsview Park, the 3D projections were incredible. Standing at every side of the stage, there was some level of 3D to the entire sequence of visuals. The story, Told through a series of trance EDM tracks, describes the human experience through digitization, technology, and exploration. It was breathtaking. As a Houdini User, it was enough to convince myself that I was probably in love with the wrong software package.

Eric Prydz
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Eric Prydz is a Swedish DJ and music producer who mainly produces House, Techno, and Progressive house music. He’s best known for his hit "Call On Me." One of Eric Prydz's most outstanding achievements has been the EPIC Holosphere, which first debuted at Tommorwland in 2019 as an 8-meter transparent LED sphere where he could perform. However, it only made one performance, as part of the stage ceiling sank after the festival's first weekend, and the second show was canceled.

EPIC stands for Eric Prydz In Concert, which usually consists of a show involving laser beams, millions of video pixels, and hologram-like illusions. EPIC 4.0 in 2016 was one of the first extensive hologram tests, which involved placing Eric Prydz in a see-through sphere surrounded by a 28mm see-through LED cube in the front projecting lights so holograms could look like they were being projected around him and a 12mm 4:1 wide-screen LED in the back enclosing the cube and playing back the critical content. This was followed by EPIC 5.0 in 2017.

The idea of designing the sphere steamed from researching circus spheres that sunt motorcyclists would perform in, commonly nicknamed the sphere of death. However, this sphere needed more than a static structure to operate. It required lights, animations, and effects to be rendered and projected in a wrapped form without too much distortion that would remove the overall effect from the show. They needed to create visuals that could rotate and be translated in a 360-degree format.

The sphere's initial tests were done in After Effects to track the viewer's focus, and the information drove the motion of its visuals, which were created in Cinema 4D.

Bradley G. Munkowitz, popularly known as GMUNK, was one of the artists involved in the project, along with Conor Grebel and Michael Rigley, both highly talented Cinema4D Artists and Animators. All the content was rendered with the Octane Renderer. Conor Grebel led the development for the Intro Animation; Grebel would help design the samples and work alongside Munkowitz to create some of the main visuals for the show. For one of Eric Prydz’s biggest hits, OPUS is an epic 9-minute build of synthesizers and percussive sequences. Lead designer Michael Rigley had to generate the 9 minutes at a 4K 4:1 resolution.

In 2019, Holosphere 6.0 (EPIC 6.0) would debut at Tomorrowland. It was joined by his long-term collaborators Liam Tomaszewski (Punkette), Ross Chapple (RCLD), Mark Calvert and Dave Green (RES), and Bryn Williams (Light Initiative). This Holosphere was around 8 meters high. Everything for EPIC 6.0 took two years to plan.

To deliver Tomaszewski’s holographic imagery, Light Initiative designed and manufactured a lightweight structural and cladding system that provided high transparency. Applied to its structure, Light Initiative developed a miniature LED strip and video distribution system, bringing the total weight of the sphere to 4.6 tonnes.

The inner and outer surfaces of the Holosphere were made up of 806,000 LED pixels, equalling 276 sq meters of LED screen surface displaying bright, custom-mapped animations. With a uniform 16mm pixel pitch, the sphere achieved 64% transparency, revealing Prydz at the center. Light Initiative had to double its warehouse space and open a new fabrication area, within which the Holosphere was made. The interlocking pieces of the Holosphere were designed to be modular and repetitive.

Upstage to the Holosphere was a 31.2m x 9.6m 9mm pixel pitch transparent LED screen that enveloped the stage. The design used more than 540 lighting fixtures. Groups of fixtures were rigged carefully to trussing and controlled by automated Cyber Hoists that surrounded the Holosphere.

Ross Chapple, Lighting Director, Co-Designer, and Operator for the EPIC shows, built automated spokes that extended out from a central point of the sphere, the longest of which was 6.5m, and wrapped around to encompass the Holosphere structure. His team also created hundreds of LED moving head lighting fixtures behind the upstage LED wall, which interacted with the content and provided high-powered looks behind and around the sphere, picking up critical points in the music and animation.

The Holosphere visuals were rendered by six separate virtual cameras and stitched together to create content that would be correct from all viewing angles. Dave Green, Technical and Software Director on the EPIC project and Co-Owner of RES, developed software used to drive video elements for over 10 years in AI software. The hardware used was two Avolites R4 media servers—one main show machine and one backup. The system outputs three video feeds at up to 2,160 at 50p and plays back media at custom resolutions in the order of 4k, which also runs at 50p.

The holograms would again take center stage for Eric Prydz’s Holo 2023 tour. However, Creative Director Liam Tomaszewski and the team at RES will be behind it now. Nine Winch50 Doubles + Power and Cat5s were used for the setup, each suspending a laser unit. The Winches made it possible to lower and raise the lasers when needed. That way, they didn't block the 3D visuals on the huge LED screen throughout the show and could be hidden back up in the ceiling. The Winches could position specific lasers at exact points in front of the LED screen. Making the lasers work together with the real-time videos. So if a component failed to be, that component could be replaced rapidly, and so it could be packed up quickly.

Check Out Eric Prydz:
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Call On Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyFWY0tFYc
Eric Prydz - Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOLd4jl0uQ8
ERIC PRYDZ (HOLO Set) @ Brooklyn Navy Yard 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOUP0w-ukJM
Eric Prydz - Holo Pryda Opus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S66D8MOZsM
Eric Prydz Holo ARC Music Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpY5_ZykkFk
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Video Jockeys
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It’s not just the musicians who make the visuals; there is usually a massive team of artists in the back and studios assisting in producing work for the show.

One of these studios is Strangeloop Studios, led by David Wexler, which consists of a team of video jockeys producing graphics for EDM shows. VJs manipulate pre-loaded clips and graphics to fit a DJ’s set, editing content on the go by adding effects and altering colors. The planning process begins with mood boards, collages of images and texts used to develop design ideas, and discussions between artists and DJs, refined on the fly on tour.

Skrillex has been one of David Wexler's many clients and artists, including The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar. Through the Strangeloop brand, Wexler founded Teaching Machine in 2011, a spatial/tele-visual/arts-collective & production company based in Los Angeles. Wexler has the benefit of having a background of being a filmmaker and growing up in a family of filmmakers, which has exponentially assisted his processes in terms of creating visuals. He attempts to add narratives to the effects instead of random or miscellaneous images that flash on screens at commonplace EDM shows.

One of the tours that involved Wexler’s narrative visuals was the Flying Lotus tour in 2017. The show was a co-lab between David Wexler and visual artist John King, A.KA. Timeboy, who operated the visuals live through a video mixing software called Resolume. However, Wexler prefers to use VR methods to plan concerts.

The VR methods include working in WaveVR to create VR shows so people can tune in from anywhere in the world. The musician can have an Avatar, and so can the viewer, and everyone can interact safely virtually.

Check out StrangeLoop here: https://strangeloop-studios.com/
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A few other video jockey companies are a massive part of the EDM scene of Vello Virkhaus of the former V Squared Labs. Now the head of Xite Labs, Virkhaus was the former official VJ and visuals director of the electronic-focused Ultra Music Festival, which takes place in March in Miami, Florida. The festival has been running for over 25 years and has an average attendance of 165,000 people.
V Squared visual packages for dance music artists, including artists for Coachella in 2013. Over its lifetime, V Squared accumulated a 10.5-terabyte library of images that allowed Virkhaus to pull ideas for artists without graphics packages or looking for inspiration, which was a huge assist for various artists at the festival. A few of V Squared’s most well-known clients were Skrillex and Steve Aoki.

Virkhaus’s current Xite Labs oversees virtual production stages for artists, graphic and motion design, 3D animation, body tracking for midi, motion, sound, visual, and set setup. They have completed the setup for The 2023 Anime Expo HP Omen Booth XR Stage, GrimesAI Coachella 2024 set, visuals for Grimes’s Shinigami Eyes Music Video, and work for David Bowie’s IMAX ‘Moonage Daydream.’

Check out Xite Lab Here: https://xitelabs.com/
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Another stand-out character is Carlo Ruijgers, who owns Eyesupply and now 250K, a Netherlands-based VJ collective founded in 2008. Working with artists such as Armin van Buuren, Swedish House Mafia, and Afrojack, he has also provided support, visuals, and other creations for festivals such as Awakenings, a collective name of techno parties and festivals that have been happening in the Netherlands since 1997.

Check out 250K here: https://twofiftyk.com/
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VJs and their teams can work with a wide range of tools from software such as Cinema 4D, Derivative’s TouchDesigner, and Adobe After Effects. I also work with Resolume, a specialized VJ Software & Media Server, which costs around $925. Vjs also have the challenge of working around copyright laws if they wish to show artwork their chosen artist would like in their set. They have to develop original ways to build upon previous ideas and create something original simultaneously in terms of visuals. Every artist and performer has to have a different set to make theirs stand out above the rest.

Top-performing VJs with their own companies and crews can make upwards of $100,000 for an hour and a half of tour-quality video, which is more than $1,100 a minute. The VJs who run the visuals at concert venues earn far less: $500-$1,000 for a well-paid show.

Another studio is Machine Molle. Known for producing VFX, 3D/2D Animation, Motion Design, Editing, and Art Direction for completing work for various well-known artists. Located in Paris Frace, founded in 2000 and operated by Jean-François Fountaine and Vincent Dupuis, the studio helps create music videos, commercials, visual effects for cinema, and other new media materials.

Some of their clients and video works include Daft Punk’s Infinity Repeating, RAMMSTEIN’s Adieu, Flatbush Zombies Afterlife, and ASAP Ferg’s Green Juice.

Some of the software the studio uses is Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for grading, Avid, Premiere, Davinci for Editing, and Autodesk Flame for finishing.

Check out Machine Molle Here: https://www.machinemolle.com/
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Excision
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If you’re a metalhead who likes EDM, you’ll love Excision. Excision is a one-man show. Jeff Abel is a DJ born in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. Primarily a drum and bass, drum step, trap, glitch hop, and riddim artist, Abel is known for having some of the best visuals in the business. Abel is one of the leading independent artists on the scene. Abel tries to turn up the visuals on each tour to the next level.

His third custom stage experience was arguably one of his greatest. The Paradox debuted in 2015 and boasted 150,000 watts of PK Sound, a fully custom stage rig, and a modular, LED-based setup for over 50 animations that would be updated whenever the set went on tour. The stage was so customizable it could be modified for large and small venues. Parts could be rearranged into six possible configurations. The sound system was also designed to play MP4s for all the music files as they were more system-friendly when syncing them with visuals.

All of the animations were custom-designed for each song, and over a dozen animators were employed worldwide. The stage setup allowed Able to see the visuals while mixing music live. This involved a video monitor with three outputs: one for playing the song, the video that goes with it, and the crossfader to mix the video independently. In contrast, up faders mix the audio.

Taking down and reassembling the stage for Paradox was a process. The teardown would take three to six hours after the show ended, which could be as late as 2 a.m. Then, it would take another four to six hours to rebuild the stage at the next venue.

Excision - The Paradox [Official Video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbNIKR2pctU
EXCISION | Crazy SHREK Visuals @ Thunderdome 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGSGRuLGL6o
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Featured Artists

Android Jones
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Andrew “Android” Jones's work has been featured in events such as Burning Man, Global Eclipse, CloZee, Shpongle, and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He has made some of the more renowned multi-media displays and lives VR animation for artists such as Shpongle, Bassnectar, and The Grateful Dead. Some of his most famous installations have been installations like Embrace (2014), Union (2014), and Space Whale (2016) at Burning Man, and projecting visuals over notational landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House and the Empire State Building.
Jones started his career as the world knows it in 2006 after a failed attempt to start an international art-hosting business with all my college friends. His good friend Lorin (Bassnectar) soon called him up and said he wanted to go on a bus tour with him for his Underground Communication tour. His first shows with Bassnectar consisted of 20-30 people in the audience, and Jones would project visuals on a large piece of plastic behind Lorin, as well as other artists such as Random Rab, Glitch Mob, and Beats Antique.

Based in Colorado, Android Jones has a distinct psychedelic-inspired aesthetic. He began studying art at the age of eight and was academically trained in traditional drawing, painting, and animation at the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida. Android Jones chose to create immersive experiences, one of which was the 2017 Oregon Eclipse 360 mega-dome experience, where spectators could interact with his digital landscapes.

Jones is known for his live animations and on-stage collaborations with music artists like Tipper and Bluetech. One of Lone’s greatest creations is arguably that of Mircodose VR, a virtual reality platform that combines art, music, and dance into a real-time virtual experience.

NEW WORKS: https://androidjones.com/pages/new-works-1
LIVE EXPERIENCES: https://androidjones.com/pages/live-experiences
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Glass Crane
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Glass Crane is the stage name for Steve McCorry, a well-known visual designer and digital artist known for his collaborations with artists such as Tipper, Excision, The Rolling Stones, Microdose VR, EPROM, and The String Cheese Incident. Born and raised in Rochester, he also worked with established artists such as EPROM, CloZee, Shlump, Boogie T, and Skrillex. He’s found and embraced partnerships with new mentors in the industry, such as the previously mentioned Android Jones.

Crane also collaborates on Microdose VR with Jones, Peek-a-boo, 2020, and DRO1D Visuals, placing its Top Visual Artists shortlist in 2020. Some of the other collaborations Crane has worked on include a piece entitled “Hylozoism” with Justin Totemical and projects with Elohprojects, Samuel Farrand, Giant Swan, and Actualize.

VC | EP5 - Glass Crane/Steven Mccorry - Bird of a Feather, Rainbow Forever!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gATw7v2gw4
Glass crane visuals: https://www.tiktok.com/@maryteeshirt/video/7349999344092843306
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The VOID
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Best known for the psychedelic visual art and computer-generated images behind Tipper & Friends, Andrew Hunter started with a background in software development and graphic design. Mostly working in the drum and bass scene, Hunter seeks to push the boundaries of digital art into unexplored realms.

According to his website, Hunter seeks to push the boundaries of digital art into unexplored realms. Blurring the line between what is created by a human and a machine, The Void actively seeks the boundary between fine art and digital mediums. His live performances meld a variety of styles, taking viewers on a mind-warping journey that can only truly be described as scientific and psychedelic.

Hunter was first noticed by Dave Tipper, who invited The Void to showcase at his events. Before the 2020 COVID pandemic events, The Void showcased his latest work at the three-night Tipper & Friends run. Some of his most notable collaborators are Chris Dyer, Randal Roberts, Morgan Mandala, John Speaker, and many others.

The Void has gone on to develop visuals for artists across the psychedelic bass genre, including Smigonaut, Supertask, Tipper, Hullabaloo, Jade Cicada, and Detox Unit. The Void also created visuals for The Rust Music’s Featherbed Sessions, which brought bass music fans monthly live streams. The Void is also an accomplished painter specializing in using acrylics on canvas.

Tipper + The Void @ SSBD 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVA3AQs1nw
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DRO1D
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Visual artist DRO1D is best known for collaborating with some of the best downtempo artists in the United States. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the creator has worked alongside Tipper, Benji Robot, Truth, and more both by performing live sets and by making album art. His most notable performances have been at Tipper’s NOLA event and ReVibe retreat in Myrtle Beach.

He weaves elements of Vapourwave and surrealism into his work, as well as influences from eighties color palettes, human figures, and natural scenes.

DR01D VISUALS: https://www.instagram.com/dr01d_visuals/?hl=en
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Kelly Fin
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Fin has worked with Renowned artists such as iLL.Gates, Golf Clap, Spoonbill, Get Real, Movement Detroit, and ReVibe Retreat. They are best known for their skills as graphic designers, animators, projection mappers, and real-time content creators. Fin is based in the Midwest, USA, and is developing her skills alongside the Bassnectar community.

Fin graduated with a B.A. in Animation from the University of Michigan in 2019 and had a very early start to her career. Before graduation, she finished customer visual packages for artists like UHNK, HE$H, and iLL.Gates, Claude VonStroke, and a variety of other techno artists. Fin is also a long-time member of the Movement Electronic Music Festival in Detroit, Michigan. As a production staff member, Fin has produced fantastic visuals for artists such as Get Real, Richie Hawtin, Charlotte De Witte, and DJ Holographic.

Aside from the techno space, Fin also collaborates with artists in the drum and bass genre. This includes artists such as Mean Mug Music and iLL.Gates’ Producer Dojo. Fin’s favorite software of choice is Touchdesigner.

KELLY FIN | MSG Sphere, XR, VJing & Beyond | VJ Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dideVahLW2g
Artofkellyfin: https://www.instagram.com/artofkellyfin/?hl=en
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Datagrama
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João Beira is the founder and creator of Datagrama Visuals. Datagrama is a visual performance-based project created in 2002 in Porto, Portugal. Since then, the project has conducted visual performance installations and directed VJing workshops. Beira has worked with artists like Dave Tipper, Camp Bisco, SXSW, Okeechobee, Live Nation, and Thievery Corporation. His team consists of six designers, VJs, and photographers. Datagrama Visuals is based in Austin, Texas, and mainly produces animations, pixel mapping / 3D Video Mapping, interactive art installments like Monolith, Monolith v2.0, projection-mapped displays, augmented reality, and graphic design software. Datagrama has produced Visuals for other events, including Portugal’s Boom Festival, SXSW, Okeechobee, Tipper’s Coalesce NYE, Astral Lights, and the 4321 Eclipse Festival.

Beira’s creative performance work, design, and research have been rewarded by the Austin Critics Table Awards nomination for Best Video Design 2012 and also a four-year International Grant for his PhD research in Interactive Design at the University of Texas. His 3D Video Mapping design in the Multimedia show Land Without Evil was featured in the PBS documentary "Arts in Context." Datagrama has also been performing Internationally in countries such as the United States, Spain, England, Russia, Italy, Portugal, China, Austria and Belgium.

The Datagrama team joined headliner Dave Tipper at the 2019 edition of Camp Bisco in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In association with Imaginex, the Datagrama team created a fully immersive projection-mapped world on the ceilings of the festival’s main tent stage.

João Beira used drones to create 3D scans of the arena over three months before the event. Imaginex said the drones “allowed for higher quality mapping and a simpler production workflow for every team involved.” Over one thousand pounds of projectors were then put into position, and graphic software Synesthesia crafted visuals in real-time with the music above the heads of the Pavilion audience.

Some of their other noteworthy animations included animations that accompanied a “Bicycle Day” video at Tipper & Friends Full Moon Gathering on April 20, 2019. This was to celebrate the 76th anniversary of the famous bicycle ride. “Bicycle Day” honors the first recorded LSD trip ever by scientist Albert Hoffmann in 1943. Read more here: https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/cisur/assets/docs/iminds/bicycle-hdt.pdf Datagrama and Steven Haman were responsible for the visuals.

Datagrama_visuals: https://www.instagram.com/datagrama_visuals/
Datagrama: https://www.datagramavisuals.com/
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Luke Tanaka
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Luke Tanaka is ODESZA’s creative director and visual artist. He is responsible for the Seattle-based duo’s visual productions, animations, and lighting displays. Tanaka specializes in 3D animation, compositing, and concert programming. He has overseen the album tours of My Friends Never Die, In Return, and A Moment Apart and developed the live tour experiences for each album from the ground up. The tour used a large-scale video wall, custom-mapped video risers, and multi-layered lighting for the 90-minute time-coded show. In 2018, the set was adapted for ODESZA’s 2018 Coachella central stage performance, which was regarded as “one of the most sought-after festival acts in music" by Idolator.

The A Moment Apart Tour utilized a combination of practical assets and 3D animation to illustrate a cosmonaut’s journey through space as he visited 28 different worlds. The show used set extensions to make the performance feel larger. The animations were designed to be easily reformatted as the stage designs changed across different legs of the tour. An automated floating hexagon housed both animations and the IMAG feed.

Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight, the people behind ODESZA, have been working with Tanaka from the beginning. Luke and Harrison started working together when they formed a close friendship at the New Media Design School at Western Washington University. Shortly after graduating in 2012, ODESZA took off, and Luke stepped in as the visual director for the tour after Harrison asked Luke, who was working at an advertising studio then, to come along and help add a visual element to the show. Tanaka, who had nearly no idea what he was doing, winged it with a tiny projector and a copy of Resolume.

Working with ODESZA opened the doors for Tanaka to explore other avenues in 3D work, such as VR and a cutting-edge drone display at ODESZA’s Coachella display in 2018. Luke Tanaka and Sean Kusanagi constructed moving pillars to prop up the drum line and horn performers and added extendable, moving LED screens and aerial drones.

ODESZA: https://odesza.com/
Welcome to the official YouTube channel of ODESZA: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW935N0msb0eDy4zQmxTwQg
ODESZA - The Last Goodbye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLKoiq6Su-8
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Johnathan Singer
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Singer is a California-born VJ/designer with a journalistic background and a strong graphic design background. Some of the top artists he has worked with have been Dave Tipper, Alex Grey, Big Gigantic, The Grateful Dead, and Desert Dwellers. He sometimes collaborates with friends and visual artists, including Android Jones. Singer is a self-taught artist who experiments in visual performance and live art. Some of these animations include compositions between computer-generated graphics, texture maps, custom 3D images, color patterns, and several other special effects.

One of Singer’s more notable compositions is the set he designed for CoSM in collaboration with Dave Tipper and the Greys. Red Rocks Amphitheater (Denver), Soldier Field (Chicago), The Beacon Theater (NYC), The Sony Theater (NYC), and The Fillmore (San Fransisco) are also several venues where Singer has displayed his experimental, psychedelic animations using his software of choice Mettle, along with plugins such as FreeForm Pro, Mantra, FLUX, and ShapeShifter for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro in his workflow. He also uses several programs including the Hippo, D3, and Arkaos for live performance playback, a Roland V800HD video mixer and a few MIDI controllers for hardware. Singer’s earliest visual work on-stage was real-time multi-media light shows.

Johnathan Singer: https://johnathansinger.com/
Johnathansinger instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnathansinger/?hl=en
Visual artist Johnathan Singer talks Tipper and Beyond: https://www.theuntz.com/news/interview-visual-artist-johnathan-singer-talks-tipper-and-beyond/
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DATA_BYTE
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DATA_BYTE is the stage name of self-taught creator and visual artist Ash Mohammed. He has worked with creators and performers like Bassnectar, Wreckno, MIZE, Duffrey, and ABELATON. Mohammed initially began promoting himself heavily on social media and soon became recognized as a rising artist who refused to be ignored. He would have a big career breakthrough after working closely with fellow producers Wreckno and Mize. DATA_BYTE then caught the eye of notable bass artists like Liquid Stranger and G-Space.

Growing up in Baghdad, Iraq, Mohammed migrated to America and became curious about visuals, particularly while in college, attending events and learning everything he could completely from scratch. His software of choice is Adobe After Effects and Premiere. DATA_BYTE has also been featured on some incredible livestream sets with Duffrey, Benji Robot, Templo

Mohammed’s style involves highly stylized graphics, with endless fractals, glossy shapes, and strange creatures set in realistic settings. These images can also be considered highly psychedelic and almost spiritual.

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DATA_BYTE_VISION: https://databytevision.com/
Data_byte_ : https://www.instagram.com/data_byte_/
DATA_BYTE_VISION Gallery: https://databytevision.com/work
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Actualize
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Hailing from Boston, Massachusetts, Actualize is a visual designer who focuses his skills on intricate stage designs and moving art installations. He has worked with artists and festivals such as Mystic Grizzly, Mickman, 5 AM, Pluto Era, Ott., Goopsteppa, EAZYBAKED, The Rust Music, Equinox Festival, ReVibe Retreat, and Couchfest.

Actualize found his calling for visual design while working with a New Hampshire promotion company called Electric Impulse. Upon noticing the lack of visuals at their shows, Actualize decided to take matters into his own hands and started developing visuals with the visual software Resolume.

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Actualizevisuals: https://www.instagram.com/actualizevisuals/?hl=en
Actualize Visuals: https://www.actualizevisuals.com/
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Tenorless
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Tenorless, aka Joe Vassar, is another visual artist working in the EDM sphere. He creates most of his visuals with Derivatives TouchDesigner as he enjoys its video synthesizer feel rather than timeline-based programs like After Effects. On top of working with Touchdesigner, he also uses Notch for specialized cases for real-time visuals for music. Based out of Asheville, North Carolina, He uses generative algorithms and mathematical patterns to create abstract designs with underlying geometric symmetry. His primary sources of inspiration are the Bauhaus movement (especially Kandinsky), Magritte, Mondrian, and Delaunay. he first studied new media at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, then obtained a UNCA scholarship to travel abroad and study art history in 2016.

Tenorless also resells VJ graphics packs for people to download and purchase. His base package includes 20 sets of visuals at 840x2160 resolution, 60fps, and 10-bit HDR.

Vassar’s latest project is The Hypnotic Theatre, based at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts in Asheville, North Carolina. The full-seated experience combines eclectic downtempo musicians with a team of real-time visual artists. This includes the team-up of Somatoast and Tenorless, Dillard and Oneirogen, Entangled Mind and The Void, and Maxfield and Papa Bear.

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Tenorless: https://tenorless.gumroad.com/l/vjpack1?layout=profile
tenorless VJ pack vol. 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg0IKXEOiUU/
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Ian Frederick
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Ian Frederick is a motion designer and 3D artist based in Seattle, Washington. Frederick is known for producing Amazon product launch videos and collaborating with EDM artists to create animated concert visuals. One of his most famous clients has been Adam Puleo, a.k.a. Wooli, an American record producer and DJ; in which he produced visuals for his 2021 tour, which had a “fire and ice” theme. Using Cinema 4D, ZBrush, World Creator, and Houdini, he created animations that included fire, lava, smoke, cloth, and destruction.
Frederick went to school for graphic design but didn’t get into motion design until he started working for Amazon and producing animations for them. He started doing device videos, launch videos, title sequences for conferences, and Amazon Smile animations, mainly produced in After Effects.

After that, Frederick realized he had a passion for 3D work. He started taking a crash course in Cinema 4D and rendering his results in Redshift. From there, he started taking on side projects, making concert visuals and music videos for fun. His career blossomed into what it is today.

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The_real_ian_frederick: https://www.instagram.com/the_real_ian_frederick/
Meet Animator Ian Frederick in This Week’s ID Spotlight!: https://edmidentity.com/2018/05/07/id-spotlight-ian-frederick/
Ian Frederick: https://www.youtube.com/c/IanFrederick01/videos
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Jonathan Zawada & Flume
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Jonathan Zawada, born in 1981 in Perth, Australia, is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the interplay between technology and human experience through painting, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, and object design. Zawada has a background in web design and coding.
He has exhibited internationally at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; VIVID Festival, Sydney, Australia; Natural History Museum Los Angeles County, CA, USA; Prism Gallery, CA, USA; Kurt Beers, London, UK; Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Australia, Calm & Punk, Tokyo, Japan. He has presented at conferences worldwide, including Semi Permanent Sydney and Us By Night, Antwerp, and sat on the Create NSW government Artist Advisory Panel in developing a ten-year vision for the government’s role in the arts.

Zawada’s collaborations range from product design to music releases, from fine art institutions to major cultural festivals like Coachella. Notably, his projects with artist Flume have garnered multiple ARIA awards. One of these projects was an AR concert for the 2022 Coachella experience. Jonathan Zawada was head of Flume's creative team, and show designer John McGuire Coachella incorporated all the festival's festival atmosphere into AR designs built on Flume’s pre-existing tour visuals/music videos.

Unreal Engine was used as the basis for the content creation pipeline. First, animated models were imported from Blender, Cinema 4D, and 3ds Max into the engine, which enabled the team to test each visual and make tweaks on-site before the show. Approved graphics were then turned into final sequences composited into Flume’s live-streamed performance in real-time by media servers running Unreal Engine, the StypeLand compositing plugin, and the style tracking data from three real-world broadcast cameras.

The team then used shaders in Unreal Engine to develop a 3D object occlusion system that helped to scale 3D models to real-world dimensions and composite them behind the stage. The team created a trigger to automatically switch graphics in Unreal Engine based on the band’s timecode. All video feeds were color-corrected live on stage before going to the show’s AR truck, where AR visuals were composited into the live broadcast feed. The team could even synchronize all virtual lighting for the stage. Once composited, the video feed was then sent back to the leading broadcast truck, where Flume’s show director was able to cut the final result from the AR cameras live. The visuals consisted of giant cockatoos and surrealist flowers, deforming doughnuts bouncing off the stage, and rainbow towers of Spectra City rising from the ground.

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Jonathan Zawada Website: https://zawada.art/
Zawhatthe Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zawhatthe/?hl=en
JONATHAN ZAWADA: https://store.gasbook.tokyo/collections/jonathan-zawada
Jonathan Zawada Big Active: https://bigactive.com/artists/jonathan-zawada/
Flume (musician): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flume_(musician)
Flume feat. MAY-A - Say Nothing (Official Music Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iczqotmm5sk
Flume - The Best of Electronic Music (Mix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmzQKVuSICU
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