"Everything that rise must converge" Father Teillard de Chardin There is always things rising, converging, and dying in my evolutionary process. I learn to use new tools new musical instruments, new programing languages, then I drop some of that learning. I get tired of a certain instrument or I simply forget to continue using a tool. Over the years there are some of these activity that I keep coming back to. Writing, playing music, drawing multi-media programming, meditation, martial art, theatre and dancing are some of main activities that I come back to again and again. There is a certain frustration in having so many interests. I feel I can't get really good at one thing if I keep on doing so many different things. There is also a disconnect between all of these activities which seems to fragment who I am. But sometime convergence happens. One or a few of my activities merge together giving me hope that all these activities I am doing have somewhat of a goal. One convergence that helped my a lot in my writing has been gopher. I wanted to find a way to publish my writing, but directly from the command line, without too much steps in between. Gopher happens, and I have been writing more than ever! When I started multimedia programming in (fluxus) to then move to processing and finally pureData, it brought together visual creation with music and interaction. I could use some of my drawings, photos or video and remix them. It felt pretty good. Recently, I was inspired by Suiteru techniques of using pureData and the midi messages from his model:cycles to create awesome visuals. That rekindled my interest in audio reactive visuals programming. I had a model:cycles until a week ago and know some pureData enough to start experimenting. I'll write more on the implicatiom of using Midi to create visuals in a future post, and I'll share my code exploring this reality. Musically, I can't stop playing new instruments. It does feel silly at time how many instruments I own. Flutes, trumpets, hand drums, tablas, piano, keyboards, synth, samplers, shakers... the list goes on. 3 years ago now, I got an Octatrack, and using a zoom h6 as a mixer I brought all my instrument in a looping smorgasbord. That was a great musical convergence. I could finally use all of my instruments together, but toward what goal? A month ago I started playing live music while leading a meditation. That was one of the most exciting convergence I've experienced. Brininging all these years of meditation techniques that I've learned and shared, with my musical skill, using multiple instruments. Bringing in my field recordings into the meditation as ambiance, and sampling other instruments that could be impractical to use live in this setup. Every audio bits are being used in one goal! At the same time I use a couple mic to use my voice, flute and didgeredoo. Since I am using my synth, sampler and looper, all that spit out midi signals. My next convergence is to bring my multimedia programing into the mix. Multimedia programing, which was already a convergence of a lot of my creative visual interest! I'm very excited to see how far I can continue to converge these activities. My creative brain lead me in the realm of fantasy. I've built my own geodesic dome for my garden and always though it would be an awesome space to lead meditation. I picture myself in the middle of the woods. Setting up a meditation geodesic dome, where I play electronic and accoustic music. Leading a meditation, while projecting visuals controled by my midi setup. The meditation continue into a movement, and then into a dance party. The projections would be mapped on walls of the geodesic dome using 6 small projectors. When certains aspect of my life converge, I feel a release. A sense of accomplishment flood my mind. It also give me purpose, as it gives values to all the semingly disconnected part of my 'self'. It makes me wonder if convergences ultimately leads to happiness or the discovery of who I really am. And if the quest toward convergence is really at the core of my evolution. From Suiteru, on YouTube I've learned to program pureData to use my midi output from my then mode:cycle. I've always like to program audio reactive program. First in (Fluxus) then in Processing, I finally landed in pureData using Gem. But audio reactive programs are limited in the way you can feed audio to a softare. You can use amplitude at first, which is the simplest audio reactive function. And then you can filter a few sound waves, the bass, the middle the high end to have other sound to visual interaction. When using Midi, you have so much information, with a lot less processing power. The programing becomes truly reactive to the music and not only the audio feed. Tweaking a filter which would be hard to have a solid feedback representation Changing scene, which could send midi setting could also completely change your visual to a new scene. So this first mergin of visual programing of my music playing was quite exciting. I've added a section in my