“Laser Music”
Right from the start, Tim Walsh connected speakers to the laser image oscillators in order to hear what he was programming! That’s right, the frequencies used to control laser beams motion are audio frequencies!
When Tim started with the Lasergrtaph DSP, he soon found that he could compose laser images just from the way that they sounded, and create compositions using these sounds. The lasers – they always perfectly match!
Following is a video of a piece that Tim composed using the laser sounds – and adding his tenor saxophone on top of it all – “Taps”
MIDI Control
The Lasergraph DSP proved to be just what Tim Walsh needed to apply his love of music to, with its native MIDI setup. The Lasergraph DSP control page has a MIDI keyboard built in!
Some of Tim’s recent shows have used MIDI to control the lasers:
Audio Reactive Laser Shows
Since the pandemic of 2020, Tim has been fascinated with applying audio directly to the lasers. That is when he was preparing for the ILDA “Laser Jockey” competition, to be held online that year, and noticed that it was legal to connect a microphone with audio into the lasers! So Tim found a way to extract the MIDI signals that he needed by using the fabulous program “Touch Designer” and was off and running.
Here are a couple of audio reactive pieces in video: