Many musicians, music producers, and music technology companies have pursued live electronic music performances being enhanced by visuals. To get where we are today in live electronic music performance and DJing synced to visuals, musicians and music producers such as Mr. Bill and KJ Sawka, Jojo Mayer & Nerve, Deadmau5, AFISHAL, and Rezz have created systems making musical performances enhanced by visuals possible and applicable. Music technology companies like Ableton, EboSuite, Resolume, and Zwobot have created software to connect visuals to live music, while morphing and putting effects on these visuals pioneering dynamic visuals for live music performance. Advances in digital music production, computing speed, GPU speed, and MIDI technology have made live electronic music synced to visuals possible with reasonably low amounts of latency depending on the software and hardware used. The Dadaist post-Cubist art film Ballet Mecanique from 1924 is a pioneer of music and visual synchronization while providing insight into how the future of the techniques emerging from this film would be utilized. In 1969, Jim Morrison from The Doors famously predicted how music would be performed in the future saying that “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes, and electronic setups singing or speaking and using machines.” 

Current projects constituting the state of the art in my field include AFISHAL’s interactive drum and video system performed a custom-built MIDI controller called the “TREMOR” in which he triggers videos and parts of songs or audio samples at the same time creating professional live performances remixing existing music and creating original music. A recent project pushing the boundaries of live music performance was when Mr Bill was on tour with KJ Sawka or Hutch (drummers and music producers that alternated performing live depending on the location of the live show) where Mr Bill remixed his own music and music from KJ Sawka creating a live performance featuring an SPD-SX as a MIDI controller with a drummer and VJ loops behind the performers. These performances tend to be high energy electronic music with varying amounts of playing each note of the music performed combined with loops playing in the background as recreating an entire electronic song live is usually not realistic. Their music is usually presented in live settings of some kind such as live venues, clubs, or festivals. Other possibilities are live streaming where streamers like TheSushiDragon take advantage of the many live performable visual capabilities of software like OBS. These projects and practitioners influence my own project by showing me examples of what typically works in a live setting, what software they use, and how they apply these various technologies and programs.

I plan to base my research on how to best perform live with the software I am using, which is Ableton Live, Zwobot, and OBS including creating new music for my performances/demonstrations, visuals with effects in Zwobot, and then putting these together. I will continue to iterate this process, while looking up tutorials for Zwobot, Ableton Live, sound design, and music production in general. In addition, I will keep trying to find new and realistic ways of applying live music technology that can possibly benefit my performances/demonstrations if implemented.