Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures a live synth jam by Expanding Sound, which is made up of Brian Funk (aka AfroDJMac) & Michael Longo.

Funk & Longo use a variety of software and hardware gear, making use of Ableton Link to keep things in sync. And their video is the first synth jam designed to be fully immersive, capturing a 360° field of view.

We asked Longo to share some of the technical details and this is what he had to say:

For the jam we used:

Two MacBook pros running Ableton live 9.6,
Using these control surfaces: Ableton Push 2, Apc 40, Apc mini, Novation Launchpad, and M audio 61 key USB Keyboard

One iPad mini using
Alexandernaut fugue machine app

One iPad 3 running
Korg Ikaossilator

The Jam video was recorded with the Ricoh Theta S 360 camera, and the music was recorded onto one of the MacBooks on Live using a MOTU interface. We then used the theta 360 software to make the video an equirectangular video file, and from there we were able to do some light editing in iMovie on the computer, such as putting in a little text and syncing up the audio file.

To add the video to YouTube, you must download a metadata program YouTube suggests to add the required metadata to your file for YouTube to recognize it as a 360 video.

We’re definitely hoping as this technology comes along both the software and hardware make the process a little less roundabout, but it was still very fun nonetheless.

Check it out and let us know what you think of the idea of immersive 360° performance videos!