We created a Facebook Live music video in which we used Facebook’s delay as an audio/visual loop pedal.

In an era of bedroom rockers, The Academic are super-tight live musicians — so we pursued a unique twist on their live performance. We discovered that when you stream on Facebook Live, it takes some time before the video pops up on your page — and that you can create an infinite loop-effect by filming your own Facebook page during that live stream. After an intense R&D phase, we successfully turned Facebook Live’s delay into an audio and visual loop sampler precise enough to loop the song. We rearranged every instrument on the single to fit the length of Facebook’s delay and introduced all the different layers one by one. The whole recording was live and had to be performed spotlessly in a single take — every mistake would be repeated indefinitely.

In an era of bedroom rockers, The Academic are super-tight live musicians — so we pursued a unique twist on their live performance. We discovered that when you stream on Facebook Live, it actually takes some time before the video pops up on your page — and that you can create an infinite loop-effect by filming your own Facebook page during that live stream. After an intense R&D phase, we successfully turned Facebook Live’s delay into an audio and visual loop sampler precise enough to loop the song. We rearranged every instrument on the single to fit the length of Facebook’s delay and introduced all the different layers one by one. And to make every musical layer stand out visually we lit the stage in a different color every loop. The whole recording was live and had to be performed spotlessly in a single take — every mistake would be repeated indefinitely. Because we live in an era where everything can be faked, we wanted to prove this was really live. That’s why we started the live stream by Google-ing the current time.

The live stream execution itself was really a collaborative effort between three different departments: camera (lighting, grip); media (streaming,); and audio (engineers mixed live and managed musician playback). What is interesting about this project is that we didn’t have to create or fabricate anything new to make it happen we had to push existing “off the shelf” tools and engineers to their limits to execute without error for 6-minutes.

The music video ended up on Reddit’s front-page—the one spot money can’t buy. From there, it went viral overnight and was picked up by many outlets. From live TV to renowned (music) blogs resulting in millions of views from all around the world all without any paid media.