A. Com 1005: Visual Compositionmr. Mac's Virtual Existence



Virtual instruments are software emulations of traditional instruments or hardware electronic musical instruments.

There is a staggering range of virtual instruments available nowadays, covering multi-timbral rompler modules to dedicated emulations of guitars, basses, drums, keyboards, and more.

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Some of these VSTi plugins (as they’re also called) are free. So in this article we’ll take a look at some of the best free virtual instruments you can download today. Many of which are pro worthy.

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Intro: About Virtual Instruments

The benefits of virtual instruments are fairly obvious. They take up much less space than their hardware equivalents, they don’t overheat, and many of them have virtually unlimited polyphony. They are also much easier to edit and they almost never break down.

Here we run down some of the most intriguing virtual instruments currently available. Although some purists may scoff at the idea of these replacing their well-loved guitars or keyboards, there is no denying that they provide a surprising range of great sounds at a price that even professional musicians will appreciate.

Best Free VSTi Plugins

The List

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The Roundup

Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player is arguably the Don of all free virtual instrument plug-ins. Based on the company’s own hugely successful Kontakt sampler, Kontakt Player effectively hosts all sample-based instruments developed for its more fully-featured big brother.

The compatibility goes the other way as well. All free instruments developed specifically for Kontakt Player will load up and play in the full version of Kontakt. Between the two, there is a staggering assortment of free and paid instruments, all boasting of the trademark Native Instrument quality.

To get budget-savvy musicians and producers started, NI offers a free Kontakt Factory Selection consisting of 50 premium instruments. Some of these are slightly cut-down versions of the instruments developed for Kontakt, while some are full versions developed specifically for Kontakt Player.

While Kontakt Player focuses mainly on standard instrument libraries, Native Instruments’ Reaktor Player is geared more towards the synthesis side of things.

Demonstration

Reaktor is of course the full-blown modular synthesis environment that gives users unparalleled and unlimited opportunity to design virtually any type of synthesizer, sequencer, or signal processor they could think of from scratch. With Reaktor Player, users are able to play back a wide variety of instruments and effects developed in and for Reaktor, with a more modest set of editing capabilities.

As with Kontakt Player, there is a huge range of ready-made instruments available for use in Reaktor Player. NI even offers two free devices to get you started: the Blocks Wired pre-patched modular synth and the Mikro Prism synthesizer.

Reaktor Player obviously doesn’t come close to providing the depth of power and customizability offered by the full version of Reaktor. Nevertheless, it is a good introduction to modular synthesis. Furthermore, the availability of hundreds of Reaktor instruments cover a board range of sound-crafting options.

Ample Guitar M Lite is the free version of Ample Sounds’ popular AGM guitar simulator. Emulating the warm, rich tones of the Martin D-41 acoustic guitar, Ample Guitar M Lite is now on its second version.

For the price of a free download, you get an enhanced set of features that now match the capabilities of the full version. The note range now spans E1 – C5, and the plug-in now works as a standalone instrument. Even if you do opt to use the instrument in your DAW, multiple instances will take up much less resources than before, and they will load up faster as well.

Demonstration

As you may have guessed from the name, Ample Bass P Lite is Ample Sound’s free bass guitar sample player plug-in. A cut-down version of the full Ample Bass P II component of the company’s Bass Series product line, this plug-in has fewer samples and fewer round robin variations than the full version. It also has a smaller note range than the paid product, covering D1 to F4. Nevertheless, the Ample Bass P Lite does a good job of cranking out the distinctive tones of the Fender Precision Bass, which it models.

Manda Audio’s MT Power Drum Kit is a free drum sampler that has a fairly wide selection of acoustic drum kit sounds. Great care has been taken to record and process the original samples, giving users a range of high-quality drum sounds perfectly suited for pop, rock, and even metal.

Those who wish to process their drum sounds with their own plug-ins might not appreciate the fact that the MT Power Drum’s sounds are already processed. Nevertheless, EQ and compression were applied quite tastefully, and the sounds should fit in well in most mixes.

Visual
Demonstration

Togu Audio Line has garnered quite a bit of acclaim for its excellent line of synthesizers and effects processors, a number of which are free. NoiseMaker is one of these, and it compares favorably to the company’s own paid emulation of the Roland Juno 106 analog synth, the TAL-U-NO-LX.

The NoiseMaker incorporates some of TAL’s more popular effects processors on board. There is the Juno-derived chorus with two modes for starters, along with a reverb, a delay, and a bitcrusher, all of which exist as free standalone plug-ins.

DistroCore’s DC Bazz::Murda is a bass and kick synthesizer that is capable of a surprisingly wide array of sounds. Although aggressive and distorted industrial sounds are its forte, it can be dialed back for more subdued tones as well. Even so, this is one plug-in that was obviously designed to get as loud and nasty as possible. For some users, that could be a good thing!

Top Pick

Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player and Reaktor Player are a couple of the best free virtual instruments that you can get, without a doubt. They provide a superb one-two punch that simply can’t be beat.

Between the two, you pretty much have all your bases covered, whether you need bread-and-butter rompler sounds, exotic World Music libraries, or synthetic sounds ranging from vintage to cutting-edge.

Given the wide range of sounds they cover and the trademark NI quality, these two are neck-and-neck as our top picks for best virtual instrument plug-ins.

Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the use of musical structures in visual imagery, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky.[1] There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.

Visual music also refers to systems which convert music or sound directly into visual forms, such as film, video, computer graphics, installations or performances by means of a mechanical instrument, an artist's interpretation, or a computer. The reverse is applicable also, literally converting images to sound by drawn objects and figures on a film's soundtrack, in a technique known as drawn or graphical sound. Famous visual music artists include Mary Ellen Bute, Jordan Belson, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, John Whitney Sr., and Thomas Wilfred, plus a number of contemporary artists.

Instruments[edit]

Mac

Sometimes also called 'color music', the history of this tradition includes many experiments with color organs. Artist or inventors 'built instruments, usually called 'color organs,' that would display modulated colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to music'.[2] For example, the Farblichtspiele ('coloured-light-plays') of former Bauhaus student Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack. Several different definitions of color music exist; one is that color music is generally formless projections of colored light. Some scholars and writers have used the term color music interchangeably with visual music.

The construction of instruments to perform visual music live, as with sonic music, has been a continuous concern of this art. Color organs, while related, form an earlier tradition extending as early as the eighteenth century with the Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel building an ocular harpsichord in the 1730s (visited by Georg Philipp Telemann, who composed for it). Other prominent color organ artist-inventors include: Alexander Wallace Rimington, Bainbridge Bishop, Thomas Wilfred, Charles Dockum, Mary Hallock-Greenewalt and Kurt Laurenz Theinert.[citation needed]

On film[edit]

Visual music and abstract film or video often coincide. Some of the earliest known films of these two genres were hand-painted works produced by the Futurists Bruno Corra[3] and Arnaldo Ginna between 1911 and 1912 (as they report in the Futurist Manifesto of Cinema), which are now lost. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced several reels of hand-painted films (although not traditional motion pictures) that are held by the Historical Society of Philadelphia. Like the Futurist films, and many other visual music films, her 'films' were meant to be a visualization of musical form.

Notable visual music filmmakers include: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Jordan Belson, Norman McLaren, Harry Smith, Hy Hirsh, John and James Whitney, Steven Woloshen and many others up to present day.

Computer graphics[edit]

Oscilloscope showing a single pitch, a sine wave

The cathode ray tube made possible the oscilloscope, an early electronic device that can produce images that are easily associated with sounds from microphones. The modern Laser lighting display displays wave patterns produced by similar circuitry. The imagery used to represent audio in digital audio workstations is largely based on familiar oscilloscope patterns.

The Animusic company (originally called 'Visual Music') has repeatedly demonstrated the use of computers to convert music — principally pop-rock based and composed as MIDI events — to animations. Graphic artist-designed virtual instruments which either play themselves or are played by virtual objects are all, along with the sounds, controlled by MIDI instructions.[4]

In the image-to-sound sphere, MetaSynth[5] includes a feature which converts images to sounds. The tool uses drawn or imported bitmap images, which can be manipulated with graphic tools, to generate new sounds or process existing audio. A reverse function allows the creation of images from sounds.[6]

Some media player software generates animated imagery or music visualization based on a piece of recorded music:

  • autom@ted_VisualMusiC_ 4.0 planned and realized by Sergio Maltagliati. This program can be configured to create random multiple visual-music variations, starting from a simple sonorous/visual cell. It generates a new and original audio-visual composition each time play is clicked.
MacExistence

Virtual reality[edit]

With the increasing popularity of head mounted displays for virtual reality [7][8][9] there is an emerging new platform for visual music. While some developers have been focused on the impact of virtual reality on live music [10] or on the possibilities for music videos,[11] virtual reality is also an emerging field for music visualization[12][13][14][15] and visual music.[16]

Graphic notation[edit]

Many composers have applied graphic notation to write compositions. Pioneering examples are the graphical scores of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Also known is the graphical score of György LigetisArtikulation designed by Rainer Wehinger.

Musical theorists such as Harry Partch, Erv Wilson, Ivor Darreg, Glenn Branca, and Yuri Landman applied geometry in detailed visual musical diagrams explaining microtonal structures and musical scales.

See also[edit]

Science[edit]

Industry[edit]

  • VJing - The art of performing visual music
  • Motion graphics - a process or technique often used in contemporary visual music

Similar types of art[edit]

  • Abstract film or Experimental film or Video art
  • Sound art or Sound sculpture or Sound installation

A. Com 1005: Visual Composition. Mac's Virtual Existence Date

Notes[edit]

  1. ^Ward, Ossian (9 June 2006). 'The man who heard his paintbox hiss' – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
  2. ^Moritz, W, (1997), The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible in Animation World Magazine
  3. ^Visual music on IMDb
  4. ^Alberts, Randy (March 22, 2006). 'Inside Animusic's Astonishing Computer Music Videos'. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved 15 June 2010.
  5. ^'MetaSynth 5 for Mac OS'. www.uisoftware.com.
  6. ^Sasso, Len (1 October 2005). 'U&I SOFTWARE MetaSynth 4 (Mac)'. Electronic Musician. Archived from the original on 1 March 2010. Retrieved 15 June 2010.
  7. ^'Tractica: Expect Big Sales of VR Head-Mounted Displays'. www.wearabletechworld.com.
  8. ^'Global VR headset sales by brand 2016-2017 - Statistic'. Statista.
  9. ^'How Big Is the Installed Base for Virtual Reality? - Studio Daily'. studiodaily.com. 11 January 2017.
  10. ^'How virtual reality is redefining live music'. nbcnews.com.
  11. ^Moylan, Brian (4 August 2016). 'Virtual insanity: is VR the new frontier for music videos?'. the Guardian.
  12. ^Mills, Chris. 'VR Music Visualizers Are Like Tripping Without Drugs'. gizmodo.com.
  13. ^'Does anybody really want a virtual reality music visualizer?'. theverge.com.
  14. ^'GrooVR Music Driven Virtual Reality - Music Visualizer'. groovr.com.
  15. ^'PlayStation.Blog'. PlayStation.Blog.
  16. ^'Inventor updates '70s creation to bring 3-D vision to music - The Boston Globe'. bostonglobe.com.

Further reading[edit]

  • Kerry Brougher et al. Visual Music: Synesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. Thames and Hudson, 2005.
  • Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale, 1992.
  • Maarten Franssen, 'The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel.' Tractrix: Yearbook for the History of Science, Medicine, Technology and Mathematics 3, 1991.
  • Aimee Mollaghan, The Visual Music Film. Palgrave, 2015.
  • Keely Orgeman, ed. Lumia. Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.
  • Hermann von Helmholtz, Psychological Optics, Volume 2. [S.l.]: The Optical Society of America, 1924. DjVu, UPenn Psychology site
  • William Moritz, 'The Dream of Color Music and Machines That Made it Possible.' Animation World Magazine (April 1997).
  • William Moritz, 'Visual Music and Film as an Art before 1950.' In Paul J. Karlstrom, editor, On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
  • William Moritz, Towards an Aesthetic of Visual Music. ASIFA Canada Bulletin, Vol 14, December 1986.
  • Campen, Cretien van. 'The Hidden Sense. Synesthesia in Art and Science.' Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
  • Dina Riccò & Maria José de Cordoba (edited by), 'MuVi. Video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music', Milan: Edizioni Poli.design, 2007. [Book + DVD]
  • Dina Riccò & Maria José de Cordoba (edited by), 'MuVi3. Video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music', Ediciones Fundación Internacional Artecittà [Granada, 2012] [Book + DVD]
  • Dina Riccò & Maria José de Cordoba (edited by), 'MuVi4. Video and moving image on synesthesia and visual music', Granada: Ediciones Fundación Internacional Artecittà, 2015. [Book + DVD]
  • Michael Betancourt, 'Mary Hallock-Greenewalt's Abstract Films.' [Millennium Film Journal no 45, 2006]
  • Holly Rogers, Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

A. Com 1005: Visual Composition. Mac's Virtual Existence Key

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Visual music.

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