#wcnewgenres

[dylanamartin]

This is a continuation of my music visualizer project.  Part One can be found here.  My main goal was this project was to make a visualizer that is more symmetrical and has a distinct structure, while still remaining hypnotic and without any clearly defined shape.  I did this by diving into the visualization function and making a few changes.  First off, I added some additional rings.  This allowed for more possible color combos and an extra layer of potential permutations of the visualizer.  Then, I changed the rotation axis from axial to radial.  This increased the symmetry of the visualizer, as well as giving it a more concrete underlying structure.  

The result is in the video.  I think it's pretty interesting.  This program uses a lot more original code than the previous one, and has a more pleasing effect in my eyes.  Check it out!  

My next goal is to add some user interaction.  Right now, I'm playing with the idea of importing camera data that picks up information from people watching the program.  Then, this will allow users to distort the shapes in the visualizer by moving their heads.  I'm having a bit of trouble with it, though, so it may not be ready in a few days, but I want to keep working on it!

[dylanamartin]

I really enjoy making, listening to, and performing music.  I also like visualizing data, and have been checking out different types of music visualizers all year.  This semester, I worked a lot in Processing, so I decided to make a program that imports a song and adds a bunch of cool visual effects to the song, sort of the like the iTunes visualizer.  The goal was to make something fun, something that a DJ at a concert or a club would use, that would allow the DJ to play a bunch of different types of songs and generate a visual landscape for these songs.  I also wanted to stray away from the traditional waveform shape of other music visualizers, and make something more abstract.   

So, I started poking around the internet, and found some cool inspiration here, here, and here, and I cribbed a bunch of code from this project.  I found some more useful examples of how to integrate Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), and Minim from Code Compartmental.  

The result is in the video.  It's definitely abstract, and doesn't really behave like a waveform, which was the goal.  However, I don't really like the asymmetry of it, and it also comes off as kinda distracting.  Plus, I don't know if it uses too much original ideas, so I definitely want to work on designing something more of my interests.  But it is a start.  

[dylanamartin]

Made this guy a while back but forgot to post it.  Figured it was worth sharing.  I took a video of a ball-tossing program that I wrote in processing. The program works by creating a class called "Makeball", that spawns a new ball object on a mouse click, and stores this ball in an array.  These balls are all initially constructed to have has size, color, and initial directional parameters based on the location of the mouse click.  Once they are made, they remain on the screen, and they interact with the "walls" of the canvas.  

Check out my code here: http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/176007

[dylanamartin]

Awesome Gif

Credit to imgur

[dylanamartin]

Concert Vibes: Thoughts on "The Hood Internet"

On Thursday, my school hosted a show by "The Hood Internet", which is a remix duo out of Chicago that specifies in mashups between hip-hop (underground to mainstream) with indie rock backing tracks over heavy bass.  I was stoked for the show; I haven't seen many electronic artists live, and I was looking forward to getting my dance on.  Plus, I'd checked out "The Hood Internet" before and had been impressed by their seamless mixing and clever integration of popular songs over more obscure backing tracks and beats (or vice-versa).  

However, I left the concert disappointed, although it had nothing to do with "The Hood Internet".  They played a fantastic show and, as my friend Zane described it afterwards, "Were dropping bangers all night."  Their music was really fun; every song that they played incorporated a mix of popular tunes coupled with new sounds, the familiarity kept each song exciting and the newness kept me listening all the way through.  And, like any good electronic DJ, the music physically moving (I could feel the bass hits tingle through my whole body), and definitely got me dancing.  I was disappointed because the turnout of people for the concert was pathetic, and the show ended up being called off an hour early because the crowd was so small.  It was a bummer to end such a great set, but considering that there were maybe 20 people left at the end of an hour I think that it made sense.  Now, that's not to say that small, intimate, venues are bad, but for a group like "The Hood Internet", I wanted a venue that was packed with people where everyone was be grooving to the beats.  This show could've been powerful, electric, and a an absolute blast.  Instead, we had 40 people dancing around to bass drops.  

But maybe that's just because I think that electronic music, whether it's composed of remixes or not, is something that is best enjoyed with packed crowds that add an energy of their own to the music that pulsates through them.  To watch "The Hood Internet" lay down fantastically energetic tracks and remixes all night without the response of the crowd seemed like a disservice to the musicians.  I lot of popular music relies on the fusion of the audience's energy with that of the music, and I think that without enough audience energy the show fell flat.  I can only imagine what this show would've been like had people showed, but I imagine that it would've been pretty incredible.  

[dylanamartin]

Glitchy Cookies: Working with Images and Quicksort in Processing

I recently was working on a Processing project where I had to incorporate media into the my sketch.  The incorporation of the media itself isn't very difficult; Processing is well-adapted to use external images in its sketches, but I wanted to do something interesting with the image once I put it into Processing.  I really like the idea of glitching images, (a really cool example of that is here), but I hadn't ever worked with intentionally glitching images, and I definitely hadn't done anything like it before in Processing.  The projects I had made were random glitches, but they didn't have any sort of retraceable algorithm that caused how the pixels were altered.  I wanted to find a way where I could take an image, break it down into its individual pixels, and then do controlled changes of these pixels to glitch the image.

Well, it turns Processing has a great way to extract pixels from an image and store them in an array via the command loadPixels(),which puts each pixel into an array, and updatePixels(), which updates updates the new array of pixels once (or if) it has been altered.  I've manipulated arrays before in my experience in programming Python and C++, and I figured I would be able to manipulate these arrays in Processing using similar techniques, and then use these updatePixels() command to make the new images.  

Manipulating big arrays without loops and recursion is a pain, so I decided to implement a recursive technique to sort the pixels into different configurations.  The technique I used is a classic Data Structures sorting algorithm called Quicksort.  I had already written some Processing code that took the image, threw the pixels into an array, and then would modify the array and update the image based on where the user clicks the mouse, but I needed some way to modify the data all at once.  I did some digging around other Processing code to look for an implementation, and then I threw it into my code as the driving force behind the image glitching function.  

Now, what my code does is:

- Upload the image and store each pixel in an array

- Resort the pixels in the array based on the X and Y locations of the mousePressed

- Update the array, and then draw the image based on the new pixel configurations.

Results are below.  The source code will be up ASAP once OpenProcessing starts behaving.  I got the source code for the Quicksort from here.

Original Image

Little bit glitchier

Noooo Cookie Monster what's happening!

Oh geez

RIP cookie monster

[dylanamartin]

Recursive Tree Implementation

The other day, I got started on a project in processing that ended up turning into something pretty cool.  I was inspired by a project by Dan Shiffman, where he built a fractal tree using recursion in Processing.

I checked out some of his source code, and then decided to take a crack at building a tree on my own.  I wanted it to change randomly each time I pressed a button or clicked a mouse, and I wanted it to implement However, instead trying to build something fractal based, I wanted to make something that looked more like a tree.  In addition, I wanted to show some images of the tree growing and gaining more branches as it went along.  Some of the images are below, and the source code is here.

Starting off small, with only a few branches.

The tree is growing, and the number of branch variables is increasing.

As I increase the number of potential branch variables, the tree starts looking for like an actual tree.

All grown up!

[dylanamartin]

This is so cool.