In June this year (2011) I was chosen to represent the UK at Parks In Progress 4 in Paris. As part of my submission I proposed to extend a previous project named Cascade, creating a visual element to the work.

I won't go into the mechanics of the Cascade project again in this post, but if you are interested in the ideas behind the sequencing process please read my previous post here.

The audio and sequencing parts of Cascade where built in MAX/msp, and with such a short amount of time available to me I didn't want to either learn the in's and outs of Jitter for making graphics inside Max, or to port the whole idea to another format. So, for ease and speed I chose to make the visual element in Processing and send data from the max patch into processing over UDP via the handy maxlink library.
The only other major change to the patch was to have it randomise the sequencers once it had played every state, an addition made to allow the work to function as an installation.

Empty steps in the sequence are represented by squares, beats are represented by triangles. When a beat is triggered a line or curve is drawn from it to the step in the sequencer below that has been advanced, showing the connection between layers in the sequence.

While making the visualizer I went through a few different styles and eventually decided to add control over them, so it is possible to enable and disable certain elements and alter variables for colour etc in realtime. This was mainly so i could tweak the aesthetics of the piece more to the surroundings it would be in.