I’ve been off the web radar for several months. The later part of 2009 saw many changes and, despite being extremely busy with several interesting projects and personal studies, I have somewhat neglected this blog.

Without wishing to bore anyone with the details, I may still post a summary of what I am / have been working on recently – at some point – though for now it will suffice to say that I’m broadening my horizons – getting deeper into Processing and OpenGl and learning C++ with OF, as well as Objective C and the Cocoa Touch framework. As more projects using these technologies arise I hope to share this learning experience with you.

Design

With regards to the re-design; this is by no means the finished article, however I felt it best to push the current theme live so that I can start posting again. I hope that you find it more user friendly than the last edition, and please do leave any suggestions for improvement – it is like most things simply a work in progress.

Objectives

My aim is to continue posting content on a much more frequent basis, though with the philosophy that quality precedes quantity. That said, I will be adding tools to help aggregate my more continuous online activity in an attempt to share more of the work and ideas of others who inspire me, with you.

Now that the site is live, I will post a few catch-up entries over the coming weeks and from there hopefully find a more natural rhythm.

So, for those of you kind enough to listen, that is the egocentric chatter over! I look forward to resuming the dialogue with you – see you around.

No related posts.

Just a quick (and slightly belated) announcement.

The distinguished Bandcamp has recently been regaled with another round of audio-visual snacks. I’ve had a lot of fun working on them, and there will be even more in the not too distant future.

The whole Bandcamp site in fact is bursting with more and more tasty new features which you should check out. In terms of my little contribution on the music visualistions front, there are currently four new full fat flavors to feast on…

Ribbons » which uses my Papervision3D Ribbons Class and is designed for crunching riffs and hard beats.

Strata » which was inspired by stream-graphs and rock formations, and flows like a charred pizza in a log-flume along an imaginary Teflon oven dish.

Plughole » which comprises of disembodied appendages and iconography encapsulating the zeitgeist of generation stupid – mashes the aforementioned archetypes up into crumbs before offering them to the esophagus of oblivion.

Hypno » which was designed to bring about universal harmony and spiritual equilibrium but accidentally caused the credit crunch.

You can see them in action by visiting an artist’s page (such as Hot Bitch Arsenal or Pattern), hitting play and selecting a visualisation from the pop-out menu underneath the cover art.

Related posts:

1. Bandcamp Music Visualisations
2. AS3 Music Visualisation
3. AS3 Particle Node Sequencer

One of the most interesting projects I have worked on recently has just been launched!

It’s called Bandcamp, and is the brain child of Ethan Diamond and Shawn Grunberger, both from Oddpost (which you’ll know these days as Yahoo! Mail).

In short, Bandcamp is a “free hosted publishing platform for musicians”, although there is much more to it than that, including…

• Design customisations and clean, SEO and user friendly URLs for every band
• Automatic transcoding of uploaded tracks to a variety of formats (including lossless)
• The option to give away tracks for free, or to sell them (at either a fixed price or one nominated by the fan who’s buying it, they call it “Name your price”)
• A stats page in the band’s CMS, which shows all complete and partial track listens, incoming links and the general state of the band’s internet rep’, whether it be blog mentions, reviews or who’s embedding their Bandcamp player and where.
• Cool music visualisations as part of their player (more on that in a moment)

…And it’s FREE!

My job was to help make the site even more unique (and sexy!) by creating a library of music visualisations – these provide some eye candy whilst you listen to tracks on a band’s page (or in their embedded player). We strived to avoid the clichéd, generic approach to visualisations (you know what I’m talking about) by giving the user something a wee bit special to gawk at. It wouldn’t be fair if ears got all the love!

Here’s a few quick screengrabs of the first 5 visualisations (more visualisations are on their way soon)…

The power behind the visuals is a customised version of the AS3 music visualisation engine I’ve been working on for some time now, which includes beat detection and a whole host of other methods for interpreting a stream, ready for visualising.

The guys at Bandcamp have been really supportive in allowing me to develop this library with a view to releasing the API in order for Flash developers to build and upload their own visualisations for use within the Bandcamp player.

Furthermore, because the visualiser has been a pet project of mine since the release of AS3, come December I’ll be open sourcing the engine so that anyone can build on it, or simply use it out of the box to produce some optical delights of their own.

Anyway, I’m really excited that Bandcamp has been unleashed on the public and I encourage you to check it out, especially if you’re a musician, or like music, or pretty visuals, or cool technologies, or great ideas, or websites…

Want to know more about Bandcamp?

Then watch the screencast (bellow) and chat about it on Vimeo, browse on over to bandcamp.mu, peruse the FAQs and see it in action!

Related posts:

1. More Music Visualisations
2. Disabed Algebra
3. AS3 Music Visualisation

Screenshot taken from ‘Sharing My Pigeonhole’

Disabled Algebra is a showcase for the incredible music of Jason kerley, aka Blackpepper.

It was also my first venture into Actionscript 3.0, using the computeSpectrum function to visualise streaming audio.

Disabled Algebra is build around a 3D engine I put together, which uses Fuse to tween the camera in 3D space. There are also four distinctive music visualisations, one for each track on one disc of the release.

All visualisations are dynamic, and some interactive also, so play with the mouse. They utilise a basic Actionscript 3 mp3 player I built to stream the music, and the user can scrub through the track with the visualisation reacting as they do so.

Check out some Actionscript 3.0 sound visualisations on www.disabled-algebra.co.uk. Project no longer online

You can buy Blackpepper’s music from Dirty Demos

Related posts:

1. Bandcamp Music Visualisations
2. More Music Visualisations
3. AS3 Music Visualisation

I became interested in the I Ching after reading biography of Philip K Dick, who used the I Ching to establish a lot of the content for his novel ‘The Man in the High Castle’.

There are several interesting visual adaptations of the I Ching, such as the Photographic I Ching and AG Muller’s I Ching Holitzka, however these seemed to either appear dated or at least not represent a more western interpretation of the hexagrams.

I decided to begin a project based on the narrative of the I Ching, and produce appropriate but also contemporary illustrations for the I Ching hexagrams. The idea was that not only could the Illustrated hexagrams be read in the traditional manner (as a result of coin or yarrow stalk divination) but also could be arranged into arbitrary sequences and actually create new stories and narrative ideas (As Philip K Dick had done)

I intend to use some of the initial ideas from my current illustrations to produce a full set of 64 hexagrams in the future, for now though you can see the current set of illustrated I Ching hexagrams here.

If anyone is interested in prints, please contact me. Also, I would be keen to hear ideas about how these could be adapted, for example I was considering building a Flash application for performing readings, decorated by animations based on the Illustrations.

No related posts.

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a short animation exploring Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko’s invention; the Autojector.

I have recently finished the animation which you can watch on YouTube above. It is a mixture of CGI, drawing, live action and collage.

The rather disturbing soviet propaganda video that it is based on can be viewed here.

Related posts:

1. The Guillotined Head