#clavilux

Still shots of music light images played on a Clavilux

This was a piece made for my final year Audio Visual Composition module.

The idea was thought up after a fascination with Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux performances. These feature twisting cloud like formations of different colours, all controlled real time by Wilfred himself.

In order to recreate this, i turned to Cycling 74′s Max Jitter. Using the jit.gen object as a basis i was able to create hundreds of thousands of particles, all moving independently from each other round a single point. This created the Clavilux style formations i wanted.

Then using a midi device, i controlled the particles real time along with the track that i had composed earlier in the year.

Clavilux 2000 - Interactive instrument for generative music visualization

Watch the Clavilux, an ethereal light organ from 100 years ago

Long before trippy visualizers and computer animation, before liquid light shows or laser parties, Thomas Wilfred was building organs for visuals. 

He called the art they produced Lumia, and the instrument Clavilux – a keyboard for light.

That first instrument was built all the way back in 1919. But unlike a lot of the spectacles of the era, this one is still hypnotic today, even after all the advances of cinema and computing.

Drawing on a tradition that included displays of fire and fireworks, and the ability to place sound “at the command of a skilled player at a piano,” Wilfred found a way to produce a visual instrument, apparently after first toying as a child with prisms.

The actual mechanism is strikingly sophisticated. The Clavilux beams light through lenses and tinted screens to reshape abstract patterns of colored light.