PROCESSING ADVENTURES

A series of posts dedicated to my PROCESSING adventures.

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Our first piece for the year for our electronic ensemble. Wrote and jammed out on Wednesday. The piece was based off a sci-fi movie soundtrack theme. We wanted to capture the essence of space exploration. To do so, we started with a repetitive arpeggio to create the sense of continuous movement. We layered huge drums and loud percussions that would come in to give a sense of u certainty. Finally, we layered paddy reverbs that were created by guitars and vocals to emphasise the sense of space. Accompanying visuals by AJ.

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Assignment D

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Assignment D (Final)

After playing around with the settings on syphon, i finally found a suitable setting with a acceptable quality. (most of the higher settings caused my iMac to lag heavily). 

Here is the final version!

https://vimeo.com/163170966

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Assignment D (part 3)

I created a static object as my 4th state. but i wanted to view it from a different angle, so using sphere detail as my main code, i positioned  the camera within the sphere and made it rotate. I also created an alternative version with inverted colours. One of the struggles i had was animating the rest of the objects in my other states. i decided to use peasy cam as a soloution. those states that didnt have to move like the first and fourth states, i fixed the camera position. I controlled all the states using keypress.

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Assignment D (part 2)

In experimenting with working with how formulas affect the generation of objects in a 3D environment, i created the 2nd and 3rd states.

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Assignment D (part 1)

so i started this project by developing a few different states as mentioned in the previous post. my first state was based off my assignment b. 

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Assignment D

For my last assignment, i made a 90 second song to accompany the visuals that i made using processing. The concept of the piece was inspired by changing frames and moving patterns. I wanted a very minimalistic concept so i used black and white as my colours. I created a total of 4 different states that i controlled using mouse press.

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Assignment C

Why I like the project:

2BCD is part of a series of works that utilizes force field simulation studies to create generative art. I particularly enjoy this series by Raven Kwok as it encourages self-generated art. The addition of rules to the code help in creating pieces that are similar in graphic nature, yet never the exact same copy of each other. Raven uses particles as the base material for the pieces in this series.

The overall contextual impression of the piece gives a sense of soft, sand-like, magnetic patterns that fill the screen starting from several central cores. The particle-generated patterns look like black sand sitting on top of a white back-light to create beautiful silhouettes. The curvatures and pulled movements of the patterns almost feel like they were inspired by iron fillings controlled by multiple magnetic sources placed under the white back-light, pulling the filings across the surface, while leaving trails of particles in its wake.

 How the project works:

2BCD was made with the concept of procedural particle generation in processing. It was inspired by Ale’s “drawingMachine_10” and was a part of Raven’s “Force Field Studies”, where he tested with the motion trails of multiple agents in various customized force fields. There are two main functions used in the code, the first one decides how much particles are generated, the second decides where the particles are generated. The generation of particles is further split into two functions, which Raven Kwok defined as “Particle” and “Interference”.

The point of generation of the particles, or basically, how the particles seemingly travel, is decided with “PVector”, returning a representation of the vector as a float array. Using this, he is able to simulate a concept in physics “W = F x D” where “Work (or movement) = Force x Distance”.

Following closely to the concept if particle movement from Ken Perlin and the “Perlin Noise” algorithm, Raven takes it further by incorporating a “random” factor multiplied against “Radians” as demonstrated in “x = cos(radians(randDegree))”, and using “sin” for the y coordinate. This helps create the seemingly random positions of circular shapes in the art piece.

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Assignment B

for assignment b, i made a short 15 second noise piece to accompany my visuals that i made with processing. the main source of inspiration was static and electricity. i used noise to create the movements and controlled the lines with minim.

https://vimeo.com/157973534

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Frieder Nake

My final piece for our first assignment involved recreating an art piece by Frieder Nake and here was my final result. I used lines which generate patterns from their original position randomly.

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Ryoji Ikeda - Lines

Also, I wanted to re-create Ryoji Ikeda’s art installation using lines, which was controlled randomly. Of course the original piece was all sync-ed to the music but we have not learnt it at this point of time.

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The Journey through Processing

So the very first processing assignment we were tasked to do was to re-create visual art by a selection of artists. I chose to work on Sol Lewitt’s “Colour Bands”. which looks something like this: 

This was the result! i worked with spheres and layered them in order one over the other to achieve this. 

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The FINAL PRODUCT!!!!

Ok so here i have the final product of the OCTSYNTH that was introduced to me by Joe Marshall. Once again, you can find the details of his project here: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszjm2/?p=605

Huge thanks to my lecturer, Andy, for helping me out and givng me idaes with the design. I made certain modifications to the code by Joe Marshall including volume controls and LED display. So here’s how i made it.

I initially wanted to build a frame to house the entire arduino set up, but walking through DAISO, i found myself a nice wooden box that would fit all the pieces in nicely. 

I bought the acrylic piece from Overjoyed. Initially, i puchased a 5 mm piece, however, i realised that it would not fit the potentiometer and the effects switch, and audio jack, so i had to go back to get it replaced with a 3mm version. I next had to figure a way to drill through acrylic. As i had no experience doing this, i cracked a few pieces (thankfully they were just scrap pieces). After a few rounds, i realised the best method was to slowly use the drill as a ginder and grind the hole through the acrylic. this way, the hole was both smooth and without a single crack.

The acrylic lid was fastened to the box with 4 mini screws that i had also bought from DAISO.

The potentiometer i used for overall volume control was initially a 100k piece. I realised that this was too much as the audio would cut out completely after turning it past the threshold. I therefore switched to a 1k resistor and it worked fine.

My button effect controlled the filter cut off effect the the synth.

My 8 touch sensitive capacitors were big fat tin bolts that i bought from sunlight. this was good because at anytime, i could change the touch interface. I added conductive tape to further increase the creative possibility of playing the synth.

The LED is positioned in the middle.

Overall very satisfied with the whole look and playability of the synth.

Here’s a slightly older picture below, before the actual assembly and the final assembly and the conductive tape.

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The little dangling wires are actually touch sensitive capacitors that generate a note whenever u touch it. Over here i managed to modify the code to light an LED! perfect.

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had some initial issues with the audio. had to change my mono jack to a stereo one or audio will come out weird on one side of the headphone or speaker that i tested on.

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Building my 8 note Octosynth

So my plan was to build an 8 note polyphonic synthesiser. I eventually worked around a code made for the Octosynth that was developed by Joe Marshall. You can find the details here: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszjm2/?p=605

I emailed him to ask for some tips and help before embarking on the project

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DRUM MACHINE

In this project, we created a drum machine using various solenoids and a motor to hit against an aluminium sheet. The rate at which each solenoid and motor was hitting was controlled with the respective potentiometer.