Algorhythmic Dubstep Competition

Posted on April 3, 2012 by admin


The British algorithmic dubstep artist Kiti le Step recently released the source code for their latest track and the Super Collider Symposium is sponsoring a competition to see who can create the best remix- either through traditional means or by hacking the code to create a new self-generative composition. The winner will get a Novation Launchpad ( !! ) and as an added twist the competition will be completely judged by computers. I decided to take a stab at modifying the code and using it as an excuse to learn Super Collider. Here’s the result that I entered into the competition. Hopefully the A.I. judges find my beat sufficiently dirty.

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Granular Synthesis

Posted on March 30, 2012 by admin

Curtis Roads is the master of granular synthesis (aka composing with small particles of sound) and I’ve been fortunate enough to study with him for the past few months. The resulting piece won the “people’s choice award” in class. It’s a study on sound transformation and gestural composition.

All of the sounds are manipulations of samples from the previous post, “Player Piano Study.” I put these samples into a granular synthesis instrument that’s controlled through a motion capture controller I’m working for my thesis. Depending on what parameters I specify, it creates really strange, mechanical sounds such as the ones you hear toward the beginning of the piece, or more mellow chirps such as the ones about two-thirds of the way through. It’s meant to be played in 4-channels (speakers).

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Player Piano Study

Posted on March 7, 2012 by admin

Recently I’ve been toying around with a Kawai midi player piano. Here’s a clip from late last night. I wrote out seven sequences ahead of time but all of the triggering and sustain pedal action is improvised.

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Old Song, Old Language

Posted on January 5, 2012 by admin

Here’s a piece I dug up from last year when I was working quite a bit with RTcmix (Brad Garton’s awesome albeit antiquated musical scripting language). I like the piece’s meditative quality and how varied it sounds for being written with only a few lines of code. It doesn’t follow canonic form at all, but when I hear it I can’t help getting this impression.

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maxamp = 1000
amp = maketable("line", 1000, 0, 0, 50, 1, 51, 1, 100, 0)

wavetable = maketable("wave", 1000, 1, 0.3, 0.2)
pan = 0.5

start = 0.0
start2 = 0.0
freq = 2000.0
freq2 = 0.0

for (i = 0; i < 100; i += 1) {
freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,6))
WAVETABLE(start, 4, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))
freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,12))
WAVETABLE(start, 4, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))

freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,12))
WAVETABLE(start2,  6, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))
start += 2
start2 += 3
MAXMESSAGE(0 \, freq2)
}
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Talking Heads: Speech Visualizations of the Past and Present

Posted on January 1, 2012 by admin

Last year I became interested in the possibility of comparing different politicians and public figures through computer assisted analysis of their speeches. Starting with archival videos of famous addresses, I created a small program that scans the volume level of the audio track and takes snapshots of the speakers at his/her loudest (i.e. most emphatic) moments. It then combines these snapshots into a single composite photo. The resultant images reveal otherwise hidden facial features and patterns of body language. When viewed in series they allow us to compare speakers within a much more controlled set of parameters than if we were simply to watch these videos side by side.

Last April I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a talk on this project at the Critical Themes in Media Studies conference in New York City. Unfortunately I never got around to creating a real post about the piece, however renewed interest in the topic has driven me to fix this. Below you will find image and sound examples taken from the talk. If you’re interested in using this program for your own work, the code can be found here. Over the next few weeks my close friend YuanYi Fan will be using the software to analyze candidates in the upcoming Taiwanese Presidential Election, so links will surely follow.

More examples and the code itself can be found on the Full Project Page

Benito Mussolini

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Adolf Hitler

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Dr. Martin Luther King jr.

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FDR

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JFK

LBJ

Richard Nixon

Gerald Ford

Jimmy Carter

Ronald Reagan

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George H. W. Bush

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Bill Clinton

George W. Bush

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Barack Obama

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OSC Record

Posted on September 25, 2011 by admin

I was amazed that no one had already done this, so I built a little program to record and re-send OSC (Open Sound Control) messages. You can download it here. Before making it run you’ll need to install the LIBLO library on your machine.

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New Tracks Summer 2011

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

I’ve made a couple new songs recently, both of which are a practice in film composition. The first is a study on the work of Eduard Artemyev, a Soviet composer who worked with the director Andrei Tarkovsky on the film “Stalker.” Here, I’m attempting to copy the affect of the films opening sequence, for which Artemyev wanted to create a mixture of eastern and western aesthetics.

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From Wikipedia: “[Artemyev and Tarkovsky] finally found the solution in a theme that would create a state of inner calmness and inner satisfaction, or as Tarkovsky said “space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium.” Artemyev knew about a musical piece from Indian classical music where a prolonged and unchanged background tone is performed on a tambura. As this gave Artemyev the impression of frozen space, he used this inspiration and created a background tone on his synthesizer similar to the background tone performed on the tambura. The tar then improvised on the background sound, together with a flute as a European, Western instrument. To mask the obvious combination of European and Oriental instruments he passed the foreground music through the effect channels of his SYNTHI 100 synthesizer. These effects included modulating the sound of the flute and lowering the speed of the tar, so that what Artemyev called “the life of one string” could be heard. Tarkovsky was amazed by the result, especially liking the sound of the tar, and used the theme without any alterations in the film.”

The second is a track I made entirely from the sampled first measure of “In a Sentimental Mood” by Ellington and Coltrane. I thought of it as appropriate for a busy city street scene, but a close friend of mine says it sounds more like someone is loosing his/her mind. The beat starts at 0:36.

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Seattle Public Library Visualization

Posted on April 2, 2011 by admin

This is part three of a data visualization project I made using 2005-2011 checkout information from the Seattle Public Library (thanks to George Legrady who apparently had to jump through years of legal hoops in order to gain access to the library’s private circulation records). Through this database, I was able to experiment with various methods to filter huge collections of information, attempting to extract meaningful patterns and depict them visually.

In this version, I created a 3D map of the 11 most frequently referenced countries and the words most often associated with each for all of 2010. I did this by collecting the first three subject headings for every item circulated with a title referencing a country in either noun or adjective form (for example, “china” or “chinese”). This created a large text file which I simply parsed in terms of word frequency.

The result reveals interesting trends: “war” was the word most often associated with Germany, “cooking” and “food” were important categories for every country except England and Ireland (proving the fact that no one likes British food), and “women” was one of the most words most associated with France, etc. To add another layer of information, I’ve included scrolling “trackers” at the bottom that display actual titles of items containing these subject/keyword pairs (Italian + food, etc.).

The countries are listed in order of popularity- China being first- and the 3D blocks can be read as literal representations of the volume of items checked out in each category.

Technically speaking, data manipulation and filtering was done through MySQL in conjunction with some fancy BASH scripts, and all of the visualization was done in Processing. If you’re curious, please feel free to download the source code and try it for yourself.

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Spatial Upmixer

Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin

I sort of got obsessed with the idea of being able to take a recording of a soloist and make it sound like an ensemble. As I found out, it’s not an easy thing to do, but adding on to spatialization software written by Ryan McGee, I was able to make something that sounds pretty decent (imho).

Technically speaking, this process is called “decorrellated upmixing” and it’s much harder than just adding a bunch of small delays to a signal. In real life, no two instruments are ever playing perfectly in phase with one another, but when we try to multiply a single signal that’s basically what’s happening, so as a result we often end up with a really strange “alien” phase-cancellation effect which sounds completely unnatural. My software gets around this by all sorts of filters and randomization techniques. Still there’s much work to be done, but I was able to create some realistic ensembles as well as some interesting effects on a variety of files. If anything it might be a quick way to sneak around copyright if you want to use someone’s recording…

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More Examples in the full project page.

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Pop Montage

Posted on March 23, 2011 by admin

Every day google’s hot trends website releases statistics on the 20 most quickly rising search queries. I wrote a program that downloads this information and collects pictures of each of these items, analyzes the images, crops them based on their content, and finally arranges them into a single visual composition, leaving us with a giant daily collage.

It’s sort of a way to take a snapshot of what society cares about at a particular moment in time. When viewed in sequence, it also allows you to pick out patterns in popular culture. As you can probably guess it’s pretty bleak. Basically every day there’s inevitably a new food or type of desert, a celebrity controversy, some random sexy girl of the day, a few sports players, more celebrities, something cute like “national margarita day”, and then maybe, MAYBE toward the bottom of the list something serious like a massacre in Georgia or the Defense of Marriage Act. Hopefully I’ll be able to set this up on a server so that it automatically makes a new collage every 24 hours. People could use it as a homepage to very quickly find out what’s new in the world without having to scan the news.

Image analysis, manipulation, and montage is done in Matlab. Statistical information is taken from Google Hot Trends.

March 2, 2011:

Feb. 26, 2011:

March 1, 2011:

For more examples, check out the full project page.

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