In response to an invitation, with the soprano Juliana Snapper, to present an audiovisual performance inside a hemispherical projection theater (in effect, a modern, digital planetarium), this talk will explore the possibilities of using Pure Data’s signal processing objects to generate three-dimensional graphics using OpenGL or Direct3D APIs. Our approach is inspired by early abstract films of the Whitney brothers, and by video synthesizer art of the 1970s and 1980s. This has brought numerous technical challenges, both at the design level and practical, and is also an interesting new usage case fro libpd that is quite different from its usual application to portable devices or game engines. The use of operations typically employed in audio processing to create images seems to be a promising way not only to make those images but also, in reverse, might suggest new classes of audio processes to investigate.

Miller Puckette is the well-known creator of the MAX and Pure Data real-time computer music software environents, which are ubiquitously taught and used in electronic music and multimedia practice worldwide. Originally a mathematician, he won the national Putnam mathematics competition in the United States in 1979, and received a PhD from Harvard University in 1986. He was a researcher at the MIT Media lab from its inception until 1986, then at IRCAM (Paris, France), and is now professor of music at the University of California. He has been awarded two honorary doctorates and the SEAMUS prize.