In Loving Memory Of

In Loving Memory is a live A/V performance piece created for an eponymous original track using Unreal Engine, Ableton, and MaxMSP. The visuals are an immersive environment extension of the sonic and lyrical elements in the song, to bring about a cohesive experience for the audience depicting a windy, stormy, and chaotic shore scene synced to the music.

Technical Implementation

The live performance was broken down into three acts - setting up the background/ambiance using a heavily delayed guitar, playing the lead guitar on top of it, and doing vocals to bring the performance to an end. I set up an equivalent narrative progression for each of these acts in Unreal Engine then. Using the envelope follower in Ableton on each of the individual channels, sending that through a Max UDPsend node, and then receiving it in Unreal Engine using a UDP server blueprint.

The background guitar influences the water dynamics, and upon reaching certain thresholds the water would get more turbulent. This was done by setting up a mobile invisible collision object in a Niagara fluids pool system. Then the lead guitar maps to a Niagara debris system and affects the spawn rate of the debris particle, amping them up on certain frequencies. The vocals then map to the lightning, triggering flashes in the weather system whenever my voice crosses a certain threshold.