Drum Kit Playing, Visualized in 3D: Portrait of the Ghost Drummer

Portrait of the ghost drummer from odaibe on Vimeo.

You might not have the chance to reflect on it amidst all the delightful noise, but a drummer is engaged in an elaborate choreography as they play. Bartek Szlachcic a.k.a. odaibe found a way to visualize just that dance digitally, in spare, rotating forms in 3D, and sends it our way. Motion-captured movements become a visual map over time. As he describes the project:

Exploration of graphic qualities in process of playing on a drum kit. Drum sticks are the extensions of drummer’s hands like brush is an extension of the painter’s hand. Invisible dynamics of drummer’s motion creates a spatial path which is both a visualized groove and a graphic notation. My self-developed technique sums the elements of areas such as drumming, music notation, action painting, choreography, calligraphy and 3d drawing.

Tech. description :

This animated drawing is a recorded motion path of drum sticks in process of performing rhythmic composition. Motion trajectory was captured by Vicon MX system, raw CSV files were translated into visual language in C4D. Thanks to David Green for tech. assistance

I worked on this animation during my recent artistic residency at Culture Lab in Newcastle.

More on this Poland-based artist:

http://www.odaibe.com/

And from him, as well, here’s a very different connection between visual and live drum kit, as video accompanies live kit onstage: