INhonolulu Magazine Issue #15 - March 2014 | Page 28

“Well, it’s first important to think
of these things just how you would
describe them,” he begins. “What
would you say makes a build a build?
In a club-type song the build would
typically be signaled by some kind
of synthesizer rising in pitch and the
percussion would start dividing into
smaller fractions—8th notes into
16th notes, for example. If you can
analyze the audio and actually pick
those pieces out and determine that
the pitch is rising consistently, then
you know this could very well be a
rising climax.
“Of course the program is not always right, but usually when it’s
wrong you can’t really tell anyway,”
he continues. “I designed it so that it
would never have clashing colors or
saturate to full white. You always end
up with a palette of really cool colors.”
In college, Robertson continued to
experiment with his idea of linking
electric signals from the audio tracks
to visual light outputs, incorporating
it to a larger extent into the UHM entry for the Solar Decathalon.
“Henk Rogers, the owner of Tetris,
ended up noticing Hawai‘i’s entry into

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through trial-and-error. By the time
I graduated high school I was already
making some pretty good music.”
Robertson then combined his love
of music with his love of video games
by offering to work on developing the
mod GoldenEye: Source (GE:S).
“I joined because I wanted to practice my music production and I saw
these independent games being a good
opportunity for it,” explains Robertson. “Being that the soundtrack was
remixes, rather than original music, it
was considerably easier to get that experience because I could focus entirely on improving the production value
of my music.”
Robertson started on GE:S in 2005,
and the mod ended up becoming
such a big hit that it was included on
one of the CDs that comes with issues
of PC Gamer.
“The game got a lot of recognition,
which I wasn’t really expecting.”
Robertson says that because he entered the realm of music production
from the standpoint of a digital composer, he had the advantage of becoming familiar with music spectra.
“All that means is that I’m able to
fully understand what frequencies of
sound are playing at any given time,”
he explains. “And now, as an electrical engineer as well, I know how to
convert between time-domain signals and frequency-domain signals,
meaning I can sample a bit of audio
and represent its frequency intensities digitally. Once I realized how to
do that, everything just made sense.
If I know what the intensity of the
0–100hz band is, I can animate that
to the kick-drum—easy.”
That’s when Robertson had his
epiphany about using the electrical
signals from audio to create vibrant,
and stunning visual outputs.
“I tested that idea by creating a filter amplifier that separated bass, mid
and high frequencies in music, and
would drive lights to those different
frequencies,” explains Robertson.
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“My dream job would have
to take advantage of all the
weird skills I’ve built up since
I was a kid.”

“From then on I was hooked. That
was the first thing I built that was all
my idea; my concept. I saw it through
to it actually being a product and after that I started building more and
more things; learning more about signal processing and how to make my
devices small and more professional.”
From there, Robertson says he began writing software algorithms that
could analyze music in real time to
break down the structure and components of a song and determine where

the breaks and buildups are.
“The software could intelligently
decide whether it was interpreting
a buildup, an epic choru ́