Alex McLean

Making music with text

Category Archives: visualisation

Thank you Graphviz

by Alex on November 14, 2007

I love graphviz. You feed in data in a simple, easy to generate format and it creates the most beautifully laid out visualisations from it. I’m trying to make a triangular waveguide mesh, and wasn’t sure if my code was doing the right thing, so ran neato over the data and got this: full size [...]

Peano curve weaves of whole songs

by Alex on December 27, 2006

Some nine months ago I played with weaving images from music, including using a peano curve as a mapping. I’ve returned to this subject, having many good ideas to explore from recent discussions with Tim Blackwell. We thought rendering some whole songs would work nicely. I didn’t fancy playing with my Java code again so [...]

Woven sound

by Alex on March 23, 2006

Woven sound is an idea by Dr Tim Blackwell, where a one-dimensional stream of audio samples or midi events may be woven into a two-dimensional structure analogous to fabric. Tim has written this idea into his software, where (as I understand it) he uses flocking algorithms to seek out patches of high activity which are [...]

Voronoi diagrams of music

by Alex on February 15, 2006

Voronoi diagrams describe half-way points between neighbours. Some recommended general introductory links: Voronoi diagram on wikipedia Centroidal voronoi diagrams A very nice interactive applet The standard text is the excellent Spatial tessellations: Concepts and Applications of Voronoi Diagrams by Atsuyuki Okabe, Barry Boots, Kokichi Sugihara and Sung Nok Chiu. Voronoi diagrams have many uses throughout [...]