VJ Heaven

Masaya Matsurra’s Musika bridges the gap between music visualizer and game, bringing a unique experience to Apple’s iPod. Matsurra, best known as the original creator of the wonderful game PaRappa the Rapper for PlayStation, has used Apple’s tools as a means for creative expression.

The iPod is a natural device for interactive music visualization. The iPod revolutionized music and it is now poised to be a progressive gaming platform. Masaya Matsuura, President of NanaOn-Sha, says “Many years ago Apple’s tools first opened my eyes to the power of music and multimedia, so it’s exciting to release my first game for this device.”

Musika uses your own music library as the basis for the game. It can be a passive experience (just sit back and enjoy the visuals) or an active one in which you can use the iPod’s center button as letters in the song’s title. As you score and advance through levels, you are awarded with additional visuals.

Musika is very easy to play. But if it wasn’t for the fantastic, it would get boring very quickly. The iPod isn’t much of a gaming platform but as a quick conversion, it’s pretty good. Its played with a single button and the use of your own music library is a nice touch. Musika is available for purchase and download from the iTunes Music Store for USD$5.

The Mawzer Modular Control was first announced over two years ago. And just when you thought that it had become vapourware, its finally on sale. I’m not complaining. Modular controllers are the ultimate idea and are almost on the ‘wet your pants’ level. I just hope the modules don’t become all loose and wiggly.

You can find more about the Mawzer here

With an increasing need to create integrated hardware/software solutions, VJs are beginning to connect input devices with wii remote controls. In this video the controller is assigned to audio filters on the computer and controls some cool visuals. Wii may not have the control interface perfected yet so these early performances may seem a bit limited. But in the near future we should be seeing some interesting Wii VJ performances.

Move over Windows, move over OSX. Pure Dyne is a high-performance, bootable Linux OS that has been modified for maximum Visual Performance and has been designed with Pure Data (Pd) as its central premise. Its a customization of the dyne:II core for realtime audio and video processing and is maintained by a growing community of media artists. If you are worried about installation problems on your current computer, you can just boot from a CD, USB key, or hard drive into your Mac or PC.

The allure of Pure Dyne is that it’s not just altering an OS to your needs - it’s taking your performance gigs with you without having to worry about OS problems. Pure Dyne comes optimized with software such as Jack, SuperCollider, Csound, Fluxus and of course Pure Data. Pure:dyne is entirely optimised for Pd, an open-source alternative to Max/MSP, and comes with an overwhelming collection of externals: PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango. - all of which normally involve extensive installion time.

Pure Dyne is a pre-built installation OS. It’s like having a backup if your machine dies. But if you do want to install it as a bootable OS, then there is that option too. So, if you’re ready for some new visuals, its all here. Flash, now with the new Flash Player for Linux, can be integrated seamlessly into Pure Dyne. A custom Pd+Flash could be vj heaven for live visualist work. It all makes for a nice link between commercial releases and free software. Its a visually-tuned, custom performance and installation environment where many possibilities for creation are available.

Pure Dyne can be found at puredyne.goto10.org