AV sync ranges from fine-grained per-parameter control for soloists to coarse cue-passing for visualist collaborators

When synchronizing music and visuals in live performance, the appropriate granularity of data exchange depends on the performance context. A solo performer controlling both music and visuals can use fine-grained connections — every parameter change drives a visual response — because one person is managing the whole system. When a dedicated visualist collaborates, too much data creates noise: the visualist needs clear, meaningful cues (scene triggers, section markers, intensity peaks) rather than a firehose of parameter values. The Livegrabber documentation articulates this as ‘the ability to go fine-grained, for solo performances or instances that need lots of synchronization, all the way to larger grain, when you just need particular cues to pass off to a visualist.’ This granularity choice is a compositional decision as much as a technical one: it shapes how tightly music and visuals are coupled and who has creative agency over which elements.

Examples

Solo performer: ParamGrabber streams filter-cutoff changes at 100ms resolution directly to visual saturation. Collaborative setup: VoidGrabber fires four named cues per song section (verse, build, drop, break) and the visualist responds to those cues with their own visual decisions within each section.

Assessment

You are setting up an AV sync system for a 3-person performance (one musician, one visualist, one lighting operator). Describe the data you would pass to each and at what granularity, explaining why.