Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance

Painterly Interfaces for
Audiovisual Performance

Golan Levin
B.S. Art and Design
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
May 1994

Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences,
School of Architecture and Planning,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
September 2000

Abstract
This thesis presents a new computer interface metaphor for the real-time and simultaneous performance of dynamic imagery and sound. This metaphor is based on the idea of an inexhaustible, infinitely variable, time-based, audiovisual “substance” which can be gesturally created, deposited, manipulated and deleted in a free-form, non-diagrammatic image space. The interface metaphor is exemplified by five interactive audiovisual synthesis systems whose visual and aural dimensions are deeply plastic, commensurately malleable, and tightly connected by perceptually-motivated mappings. The principles, patterns and challenges which structured the design of these five software systems are extracted and discussed, after which the expressive capacities of the five systems are compared and evaluated.

Thesis .PDF file, 300 dpi ( 9.3 Mb, 9/2000 )
Thesis .PDF file, 600 dpi ( 23.4 Mb, 9/2000 )
Initial Masters Thesis Proposal ( HTML, 11/1999 )

Thesis Supervisor: John Maeda
Associate Professor of Design and Computation
MIT Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis Reader: Tod Machover
Professor of Music and Media
MIT Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis Reader: Marc Davis
Chairman and Chief Technology Officer
Amova.com