Lichtspiel

Overview

Lichtspiel is a Live-native audiovisual instrument. It reads the musical structure of an Ableton Live Set including clips, scenes, MIDI/audio content, device macros, transport through the Live Object Model and uses it to retrieve, shape, and morph code-native p5.js visual scenes. The performer plays the relationship between sound and image on a monome grid + arc, navigating a semantic visual space: locking states, mutating parameters, and jumping to 'near' or 'far' visual correspondences while continuing to perform in Live. The architecture keeps Max for Live as a thin Live-native shell while the real logic lives in a Node WebSocket bridge, a browser p5 runtime, and a Python retrieval script (metadata to MIR descriptors to embeddings). The runtime never depends on an LLM or the internet, agentic tooling is build-time only.