Archive for the ‘wovensound’ Category

20010203 (translated)

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

Peano weave applied to a slub classic for Ade’s birthday..

Higher quality AVI available at slub.org

Peano curve weaves of whole songs

Wednesday, December 27th, 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 wrote some Haskell, which I’m rather pleased with. The source is available (feedback welcome!). It does the the mapping using seeks on the output file, allowing impressive memory efficiency via Haskell’s lazy evaluation.

Some examples of some indie synth pop, disco, minimal techno (*3) and industrial gabba below, click on the images for the full versions but beware, they are rather large, around 5M each. Mouseover for the original track names.

Boy From School - Hot Chip At Last I Am Free - Chic Ping Pong - Plastikman Ping Pong - Plastikman (different curve)
Ping Pong - Plastikman (with some colours) Unborn Baby - Venetian Snares and Speedranch

Woven sound

Thursday, March 23rd, 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 then unwoven back into sound.

Inspired by this I have made my own implementation of woven sound. It doesn’t produce very interesting audio output yet but so far the animated visualisation is pleasing.

My idea is to have autonomous agents running around the fabric at audio rate, changing the rules they follow on the fly. Not quite there yet.

As well as weaving the sound in a traditional manner (warp and weft?) my implementation can also weave in a Peano curve. I made a prototype which draws the Peano curve in processing, which helps see its structure. The movement is complex but the idea extremely simple; is to take a line, twist it in a figure of eight, then do the same with each new line segment recursively. Infinite recursions would fill a 2D square completely, but here I limit the recursions to 4 or 5.

These screengrabs give a general idea but to see the full effect and the relationship between the woven sound and the sound source, plug in your microphone, download my software and make some noise. The java sourcecode is in the jar file.

All of my software mentioned here is copyright 2006, available under the terms of the GPL version 2.0.