Learning a New Skill: VJ’ing

In this Creative Project, lead by An Tran in completion the requirements for MUSI 489-Music Technology Capstone, is a short description about the research and discovery they made in the practice of VJ’ing. VJ’ing is a practice that combines both visual media and music DJ in a multimedia medium for entertainment.

The project will culminate in a performance day at the end of the semester, where An will perform their set in a small venue along with other VJ guests.

Hello, my name is An Tran. I am a Music Technology student and I’m presenting my capstone, specifically my creative project; which is learning an entirely new skill, also known as VJ. And basically what it is, is that it is a combination of both DJing and visual art, combined together to make an experience for audience members.

And so for the past month or so, I’ve been learning how to use this program. Rekordbox up here, you can see the BPM of the song, the song list that I have, and the cue points that I use throughout the set.

And my goal throughout the past month of learning this is to be able to learn how to do all the basics such as beat matching, how all the buttons work, and what different methods I can use to get through it. And with the visual aspect of this, usually what I would do is I would send the audio that comes out of here, for example: [Music Plays].

That audio that you hear, I would send it through an interface. I am showing a version by Paul Andrew on YouTube. He has a great tutorial on this. I am using TouchDesigner, as you can see here. The music would travel through this interface and they use the audio to change different parameters and present a unique visual. So if I can play a little bit as an example: [Music Plays].

So TouchDesigner is a really powerful tool where there’s many different nodes or known as operators. There are visual operators but there are also operators that can be changed on parameters, such as the audio coming here that would change these numbers if I were to play; and that would affect the different visual. At the very end of this chain I have an open source called Sprout.

And what that is, is that it creates some sort of network that I can send in between different programs. So this “sprout out” will then go on to Resolume, which is a software I am using in order to showcase the VJ set to the audience. So this is what the composition should look like, and I will play a little bit of the rest of it before ending this: [Music Plays].

Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it and hopefully I will be able to put on a set for other people to view. Thank you very much!