These are my shoes, these are my lights

So last week the wonderful Lee J Malcolm and I built our new sound and visual system.
We were very well behaved, and rather indulging (!) in a week of rehearsals we slowly but surely taught ourselves how to create Max 4 Live patches for Ableton Live, and arduino processing.

What we’ve done is completely rearrange how our Ableton Live sets work, and how we’re generating sound:

*We have used Ableton’s clever systems to use the feed from the tap floor boards, to lay down seperate loops, to seperate sample groups.
*Each of these loops is analysed by a Max4Live patch, which detects the attack (at the moment) and created Midi data.
*Another Max4Live patch creates LX commands, which sends to an arduino and generates lights.
*I can programme loads of different animations for the addressable LEDs, which can all be triggered within Ableton Live.

We’ve got it working wirelessly, and I should within the next week or so be able to do this for at least 4 separate strips/ groups of addressable LED’s.

What we’re most pleased about with this, is that it brings five separate programmes and functions, which at the top of the week were separate, into one cohesive reusable and adaptable unit.


A major learning curve, and a week without enough dancing, but I loved it. I must apologies for the shaky videos! Making the trailer for this show is going to be really interesting with such varying light levels.

Oh, and the bonus after all? We spent the last afternoon talking riffing through all our stories, the narrative arc. We’d reached a place where we can riff on ideas building the compositional form, knowing that the system will support them, and enable us to make an incredible show.