Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Atari Video Music


Chuck Clark sends us his great page of information about an ancient Atari-branded Music visualizer- Atari Video Music.
Additional Link

8 comments:

Robotkid said...

These are amazing! I use this in all my VJ gigs. I just used it for a new video for the band "8-bit" for their song "I-Deez." Check it out here:

http://www.ninjastarrecords.com/Elements/video/I-deez.mov

Wiley said...

I'm pretty sure that the deaf kid was playing with one of these in a scene in the film Over the Edge.

cemenTIMental said...

I've heard of these, but haven't seen that page before, cool stuff! I want one, of course. Love the photo on the ad!

Wiley said...

Atari built another visualizer for the Jaguar in the 90's called the virtual light machine. It's pretty cheezy though, looks like a bad winamp/itunes visualizer. I thought it was pretty cool at the time though.

I would actually love to have one of these older ones. It would look cool on a rack.

Nick said...

Same thing they used for the backgrounds in the Devo "The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprise" video, too.

Wiley said...

According to the website, the new version of motion will take midi input, so you can control animations and particle generators with a midi keyboard or control surface. It sounds like you could also give it a midi track and use it as a sort of music visualizer.

http://www.apple.com/motion/

Anonymous said...

wiley - the jaguar visualiser was jeff minter's project. the guy who coded all those llama themed games for various (mainly commadore) home micros in the eighties.

last time i looked at his site, he was writing a built-in visualiser for the gamecube:

http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/vlm.php

Wiley said...

I was a big fan of the Jaguar visualizer when it came out, that and tempest 2000 were the only reasons to get a jaguar. I'd really like to see people get away from jaguar/itunes style visualizers now though.. I'd love it if someone could emulate something really primitive and analog looking like atari video music... or take it in a totally new direction. Lately I've been looking to hand-animated audio visualizations and I wish generative ones could capture a little of what they're able to... hopefully by using more than just EQ to create animations.

Check out some of the Otto Fishinger stuff here:
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/

Looking forward to a gamecube visualizer!