Processing Mother

Those artists that enjoy creating content using Processing (especially for live performance) would sure be interested in methods and techniques on dealing with manipulation of such code snippets/visual Synths between one another in live environment.  Positively, sound reactive and midi controlled approach would also be of be of benefit.

This field is evolving and growing quite rapidly which is a good thing. Combination of open source technologies provide us with opportunityand ideas to push evolving scene to a new heights.

Mother (For Processing):
http://www.onar3d.com

In the last few months I had come by application called Mother (Previously mentioned on CDM and vdmoKstati.com) which was developed by developer from London – Illias Bergstorm . His vision was to put together an approach which would allow Processing Visual synths (Processing sketches exported to .jar through Processing export) to be controlled via likes of Max or PureData.

Pure Data sits much nicer with me as its Open Source as it doesn’t ask for purchase as it does from Max. Much more widely acceptable for educational purposes and sharing.  Note: At present this application is Windows only, and yet I’m positive that this project would eventually  spread to all other platforms as it matures and grow.

So.. what’s next?
Setting up Process…ing Mother (Windows Only)

Ok, lets get started.  Do one of the following.  Download  Mother 0.4 - (Aprogram that allows VJing with Processing.org sketches) .  Save and Extract onto you hard drive.

Presuming that you were on windows , you should be nearly all set.

Depending which way you will be choosing to try this out two options are available, Max and PuraData, Pure Data is the one I’ll highlight right now.  Max version is self contained example, yet for further editing and manipulation, you’d need full working trial or professional version.

For Pure Data control, you should install the software from http://puredata.info/downloads .  If PureData sounds like your game, also add GEM libray provides crutial number of externals to deal with video objects, etc. http://puredata.info/community/projects/software/gem/releases/0.92.0 (Current Version at the time of writing)

Anyway, when you extract your zip file, the directory structure will look something like this:

We’ll have to do little editing to adjust the system to your own environment. Click on ‘Mother with Java‘ folder and open mother.ini file. Editing is straight forward, simply change the path for the directory where you have your Synths examples folder. eg. SynthFolder=C:\Mother0.4Synth examples;   and Save.  The other preferences are self explanatory.

Now we are ready to open Mother. Click Mother.exe
(Blank window will open flashing from White to Black… thats Normal..)

For those that might be confused by this at first, Mother is space where all the action takes place which is controlled by external applications – examples For Max and Pure Data are provided.  Read on…

Launching Controlling Systems:

[Pure Data]

While your Mother App is still running, go to the Pure Data Controller  folder in the Mother Directory(eg. C:Mother0.4PureData controller ) and launch Pure Data controller example.pd file.

Note: This will require Pure Data to be fully installed.

You should get something like this >

Click Individual Bar for Creation and Or Removal of your synths in Pure Data that will be sending out signals to Mother application screen.1. Click to Add the Gradient >> [Mother/Add_synth ss Gradient Grad_02]. Underneath it really should say 2. Click to add the Waltz file (yet it says Gradient.. Fix this up for yourself  “Ctrl +E” if you like).

So… what you think?

Very interesting way of interfacing between Pure Data and Processing creation mechanisms. I think there is a lot of potential there.  My personal explorations will follow.