I’m Matt Pietrucha, a new-ish grad student at WPI in the IMGD program. My background is a B.A in Music Education from Montclair State University in NJ.
I think my earliest memory of experimenting with light was being a little kid and playing with a lite-brite. If you’re not semi-old like me and never seen one of these things, here you go:
In high school I was mostly into experimenting with recording music and making electronic music. I got into Ableton Live and started making beats and glitch music as probably a lot of people do. This would become one of my greatest passions and lead to all sorts of other related fields like sound design and interactive programming in programs like Max/MSP.
One of the things a friend and I would do in high school and early college years was go out at night and do light painting for fun. One of my early album covers for an LP of beats I made in my junior year is light art we made in the woods, which was done by having each person write an individual letter or two.
Lately I spend most of my time using Max/MSP, but I’m starting to miss the idea of performance. Electronic performance is usually a hard sell — nobody wants to be a DJ just pressing “play”, and even if your set-up is “live”, nobody really knows what you’re doing anyways. Exploring ways to make performances feel more immersive or interactive might bring me back into the fold. I also like considering how visuals can impact the context of music and performance from a compositional level — it’s rare that I get to compose for visuals unless I get asked to make trailers or advertisement sound design.. and that’s usually utilitarian in purpose.
Here’s me tinkering around with a program called MLRV on a open source controller called a Monome. It’s in the juke/footwork style, which is still popular in Chicago but sort of a niche thing (wow I sound pretentious!)
My most recent audio-visual work I’m proud of is this track and video:
The visuals are done in real time by a Jitter patch that takes MIDI data from my music as well as low/mid/high EQ bands and then maps them to a jit.noise object. The visuals are jit.noise, usually gaussian but it shifts around a lot. The EQ and MIDI trigger different scalings, rotations, and types of noise. It’s kind of minimalist like a glorified iTunes visualizer but I think it’s pretty cool.
I also have been trying to build up a portfolio of sound design and composition for animation, film, and games. This is one of my favorite things to do as it doesn’t have the creative pressure of writing music for yourself, it just serves some other purpose. This piece is for a SCAD animation final project.
Anyways, I’m excited to work with hardware and electronics during this course as it’s definitely outside my comfort zone but always been on the periphery of music composition and performance. I’m hoping to combine my interest in sound design and audio with lighting.
If for some reason you’d like to hear/see more of my work, you can check it out at http://mattpi.net
Also feel free to reach out if you need sound/music on a project!