Day 222 / A Very Mysterious Application

Todays post is still sort of just a preliminary post because my computer is still rendering.  UPDATE:  It’s finally done and ready for viewing below.  Read the description beside the * to understand what you’re seeing.

Last night, like most nights lately, I was unsure and a little uninspired.  I was going to work on my song for the Monome Community Remix project but I wasn’t really feeling it.  I ended up looking at this application that a fellow monome user, Bite, guided me too.

It’s called Argeiphontes Lyre and it has to be the most esoteric and mysterious application I’ve ever messed around with.  If you load up the help menu it just brings up a window that says some random phrase like “Yummy Pork Chops” or “Trailing Sweetness”.  The only way to get to know the application is by feeling around in the dark.

This is what I’ve learned.  It is an application consisting of many applications which you can load up from the toolbar at the top of the screen.  Each of the applications also has their own esoteric name like “The Lobster Of Quadrille” that only hints at its purpose.  Each of the apps is meant to work with either audio, video, images or text and also produces audio, video, images or text as well.

The pictures above were made with an app called “Symmetries Seventeen” and “Hacerse Anicos”.  The originals are from “Day 217 / Desert Sunset” and “Day 214 / Modular Origami“

* The video below was not edited by me. It was edited by an algorithm using one of the sub-apps called “Recombination”.  It’s pretty cool.  Basically, it takes the video file that you load into it and creates a new video clip out of it, except randomly jumping around different places within that clip.  What you end up having is a montage created from the original video clip.  You can set parameters like resolution, frame rate, total running time and finally edit duration.  This last one is the most important one.  It sets the rate that the resulting montage will be cut at.  You can also use a method called a “Function Curve” to randomize the edit durations a little.

*So what I decided to do was import a ton of the finished cut pieces I’ve done for this blog and put them onto one timeline.  Then I exported it before bed.  I opened that extremely long video into Argeiphontes Lyre, into the sub app “Recombination”, and told it to create a 3 minute video, using a random function curve for the edit durations and running at 24fps.  It ended up crashing multiple times.  Once I set the total running time to 30 seconds it finally made it through a complete render.  So, I repeated the process three times to ultimately create a minute and a half montage.

*I also used another sub-app called “Audio Interpretations”.  This sub-app takes an audio file and interprets it into video using color.  It uses a bunch of methods I don’t quite understand yet but at the beginning and end of the video below I use it.

And there you have it, instant music video.  Since I am an editor by trade I have often thought of the concept of a computer editor.  I love that this application is one tiny step of the way there.

If I were a music video editor used to cutting montages out of random archival footage I would surely use this “Recombination” app to create variations on a montage.

And by the way you can download, Argeiphontes Lyre for free from here.  Unfortunately, the latest version doesn’t have Symmetries Seventeen but if you’d like that version send me an email and I’ll forward you a link.  But if you enjoy the app be sure to donate to the link above.  The developer of this app has definitely put in a lot of effort to make it the way it is.

Enjoy