TouchDesigner Live Course & Masterclass

We have been invited to develop and present a masterclass at Conservatorio Licino Refice about real-time interactive performances using Touchdesigner. The masterclass spanned over 5 days for a total of 28 hours. Students' academic backgrounds were mostly from sound engineering and electronic music.

We chose to teach a specific software like TouchDesigner due to the wideness of its applications and since it is the one we favor for creating interactive installations and live visuals.

The masterclass featured:

• Live coding and explanation about audio, 2D, and 3D operators.
• Exercises based on the recreation of patches based on the lesson topics.
• Guided workshop moments where students had to answer real-life briefs.

Disciplinary approach

We wanted to give students a hands-on experience with the software to foster not just technical skills but also creative thinking, so we designed the masterclass to be project-based. Each day we presented a specific topic and then students had to recreate a patch based on the lesson. The last two days were dedicated to a guided workshop where students had to answer real-life briefs and create their own interactive audiovisual systems.

We explored two kind of systems during the masterclass:

• Audiovisual instrument: Create a gesture-driven performance where audio and video are one element, exploring different kinds of interactions.
• Live visual: Support an audio performance by building audio-reactive or gesture-controlled visuals.