Godot for audio-visual installation (generative music, projection mapping)

woodwindblues

Hello,

I am a musician and work a lot with interactive audio-visual installations. I am thinking about switching from Max MSP / openFrameworks to a game engine for the developement of my installations.

Does Godot's Audio Engine have features that would allow me to program generative music (music that is not pre-determined but generated & synthesized/sampled according by an algorithm and user input)?

Does Godot have features that allow for projection mapping (using one or multiple projectors to project visuals on buildings, objects, ect and the video beeing mapped/warped to fit the things it's projected on)?

I've read through the docs, but could not find answers or examples for these usecases. It would be great, if somewone could shed some light on these questions.

I am sorry if this is the wrong subforum, I was not entirely sure where to post this. Feel free to move it. I also (mistakingly) submitted this as a question before posting it here (I mistook the Questions & Answers section for a forum).

Thank you!

Megalomaniak

@woodwindblues said:

Does Godot have features that allow for projection mapping (using one or multiple projectors to project visuals on buildings, objects, ect and the video beeing mapped/warped to fit the things it's projected on)?

Not an audio person so can't comment on that myself, but I'm fairly confident that godot doesn't have anything for specifically dealing with projectors, however the OS class can be used to call on external executables, which might help.

Calinou

I don't think Godot supports projection mapping. Procedural audio generation is supported, but is best done in C# or GDNative as GDScript isn't fast enough to do this (except at 22,050 Hz or lower).

woodwindblues

I guess for projection mapping it would be a good start, if I could add multiple cameras to a scene and send each camera-output to a different projector.

Regarding audio, most of my projects right now are sample based. So I would not need to generate the sound procedurally, I just need to programm a sampler that is sequenced procedurally and effects that are applied/modified procedurally.

Calinou

So I would not need to generate the sound procedurally, I just need to programm a sampler that is sequenced procedurally and effects that are applied/modified procedurally.

Godot doesn't support scheduling audio events to be played at a specified time, so it's probably not a good fit for this yet (unless your music has low BPM).

cybereality

I don't know about audio. In terms of projection mapping, it could be possible with a custom shader but it would be manual work, not anything built in. I guess in theory you could import some sort of displacement map and use a full screen shader to warp the image (or other such tricks). Not sure this would be good enough quality but I imagine it would be okay.