With Flying Colors Presents “Dreams Dyed Blue: A Journey Through Dreams In Sound and Color” (2025)

by Timothy ‘ill poetic’ Gmeiner, Ben Guerrette, Mingyong Cheng, LUX | LUMN, David Aguila, Natalia Merlano-Gomez & Anita Chandavarkar

“Dreams Dyed Blue” introduces live hip-hop to the immersive media space by presenting a spatialized audiovisual performance interweaving lyricism, beats, improvised electroacoustic musicianship and projected visuals. This experience explores the beauty, fear, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery, as told through the story of a small child’s journey through the stars.

About: Inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s childhood classic “The Little Prince”, "Dreams Dyed Blue" is an immersive audiovisual hip-hop performance that explores the beauty, fear, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery, as told through the story of a small child’s journey through the stars. Through a synesthetic relationship of spoken-word lyricism, electroacoustic improvsiation and dynamic projected visuals, this introspective performance reconciles the inner-workings of one’s unique imagination and the remembrance of loved ones lost to the universe around us.

Performance: This performance debuted on April 17, 2025 at UC-San Diego’s Experimental Theater. It was performed using a 32-channel soundsystem and full back wall projection screen. Real-time audio from vocal, acoustic and electronic elements were used to generate spatial and visual components of the performance. Conversely, visual projections informed performative aspects of the electronic music elements. With the goal of creating a truly dynamic and immersive experience, all multimodal aspects of this performance directly influenced the others in real-time.

Personnel: Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner - vocals, electronics // Ben Guerrette - visual director, visual designer // David Aguila - trumpet, modular synthesizer // Natalia Merlano-Gomez - vocals and vocal effects // Anita Chandavarkar - flute // Mingyong Cheng - visual designer // Lux | Lumn - visual designer // written & directed by Timothy “ill poetic” Gmeiner

Technical Specs: This performance is built around OSC dialog across two separate networks communicating from a single laptop running Ableton Live and various MIDI controllers to 1) a 32-channel Meyer Sound System via the Meyer SpaceMapGo application, and 2) two laptops running two instances of TouchDesigner. Visuals and spatial coordinates are triggered in real-time based on various electronic synthesis and resonance properties as well as acoustic properties based on live musician improvisation. The VBAP (Vector-Based Amplitude Panning) spatialization technique is used to more accurately distribute sound between virtual speaker nodes, rather than be solely dependent on the speaker positions themselves, allowing for a more reliable accuracy in spatial and visual coordinate pairings.

Examples of four pieces performed, including the live capture of the musicians, can be viewed below:

With Flying Colors ft. Mingyong Cheng, David Aguila & Natalia Gomez "Do You Smile In Your Dreams?"

"Do You Smile In Your Dreams?" is a spatialized live improvised audiovisual performance that journeys through a mind with dementia to paint the walls with sound: music and words that poke through the fog and isolation to invite brief but powerful moments of colorful memory and human connection. In this story, indistinguishable murmurs from strangers in a hospital room heard by the patient are interrupted by a loved one's voice which cuts through the fog and confusion. This voice, presented in the piece as a Cherokee recitation of “The Lord’s Prayer”, provides the basis for recollection, represented by colorful reactivity in the patient's 3D MRI brain scan every time it’s heard. These brief moments of connection end with the patient's successful retrieval of a series of meaningful memories. This live performance builds off the 2023 fixed installation of “Do You Smile In Your Dreams?”, which can be viewed here. Visuals by Mingyong Cheng | Trumpet & Modular Synth by David Aguila | Vocals by Natalia Merlano-Gomez.

With Flying Colors ft. Anita Chandavarkar "Tree Tones (Variation I)"

“Tree Tones (Variation I)” is an electroacoustic multimedia piece that aims to compose a journey through surrealist worlds of natural elements in which spatialized resonating 'raindrops' and noise-filtered 'wind' engage with improvisational bansuri flute and visual projection to explore the subtle beauties in human-nature-technology relationships. In it's employment of sound-manipulation, spatialization and real-time audiovisual mapping, this journey embraces the brilliance of technology as not an adversary, but a medium in which to prioritize humans' coexistence with the vastness of nature.

In this electroacoustic piece, resonators are randomly generated across 32 channels of spatial audio and simultaneously mapped to visual raindrops of the same randomized coordinates. As the resonating notes increase decay, they become more melodic, allowing for variations in pitch and noise harmonics. These musical qualities are in dialog with various parameters of a concentric circle to alters it's shape piece by piece pending note decay, noise filtering and melodic movements. This improvisation is joined by the flutist Anita Chandavarkar on bansuri, who dialogs directly with the electronic resonators. Essentially, the flute, electronics and visual elements are all informing each other in real-time. Visuals by Ben Guerrette.

With Flying Colors f. Mingyong Cheng, Natalia Merlano-Gomez & David Aguila "Pigments of Imagination"

“Pigments of Imagination” is a spatialized electroacoustic-hip-hop audiovisual installation that frames the creative process as a narrative relating the synesthetic inner-workings of one’s unique imagination to the universe around us. It is an observation on the beauty, adventure, sadness and loneliness of self-discovery and the artist’s ultimate recognition of process as goal, as told through the story of a small child’s journey to the moon. This performance is derived from the “Pigments of Imagination” virtual reality experience, which can be viewed here. Visuals by Mingyong Cheng | Trumpet & Modular Synth by David Aguila | Vocals by Natalia Merlano-Gomez.

With Flying Colors ft. LUX | LUMN "The Beautiful x Nocturnal"

Fixed visuals created by Brian "LUX | LUMN" Goodwin in Unreal Engine, mapped to a live, spatial performance of "The Beautiful" with integrations from a prior multimedia collaborative musical production, "Nocturnal".

Contact: Timothy Gmeiner: tgmeiner@ucsd.edu | Ben Guerrette: ben.guerrette@gmail.com