Relentless

Transform your iTunes music into audio-visual art.

Download: Mac/PC

The REV is a state-of-the-art music visualiser originally created to enhance the live performances of Relentless Artists. Now the same cutting edge technology appears as an iTunes plug-in for Mac and PC that responds to the music you play at home in an infinite number of combinations. Every track you own becomes a personalised piece of audio-visual art as The REV generates a totally unique set of complex three-dimensional forms that can never be repeated again.

The technology behind the project is cutting edge. It took months and months working day and night with digital artists and leading exponents of data visualisation in the US and UK to turn it from concept to live projection tool to this downloadable plug-in. Robert Hodgin and Andrew Hall, who worked with us on the project, are two of the world’s leading lights in Processing, an advanced programming language, and were instrumental in making the whole idea work. They had already developed some software called Magnetosphere - since picked up by Apple to bundle in with the new version of iTunes - which responded in realtime to some form of audio input, generating complex and elaborate shapes when triggered.

Every track you own becomes a personalised piece of audio-visual art as The REV generates a totally unique set of complex three-dimensional forms.

When we hooked up with Andrew and Robert in New York on a frosty New York morning, it was clear that technology had - inevitably - moved on. We wanted to go back to the Magnetosphere platform, but build on it and push it to its outer limits in an effort to bring Relentless to life in three extraordinary dimensions. In short, we wanted people to gasp when they saw this thing in action at gigs. Squashing that technology and rendering capacity into something as manageable as an iTunes plug-in seemed a long way off...

Fast forward six months, half a year of blood, sweat and early morning fights over frame rates and texture maps, and here we are in 2009 with an application that works on any kind of PC or Mac platform...