Soulwire » Audio

Noise-Reactive Particle Sphere

Soulwire — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:01:06 +0000

I’ve been trying to find more time lately to experiment with C++ and get more familiar with the OpenGL API and to achieve this have been using the excellent Cinder library. I’m a complete C++ novice and, coming from a Flash background, it’s immediately apparent how much of the hard work had been done for you in higher level languages like AS3. Learning about pointers, memory allocation and fumbling your way around undescriptive compile errors is bit of an eye opener, although thankfully libraries like Cinder and OpenFrameworks help take a lot of the pain out of the transition and ultimately function as very exciting and inspiring tools to work with.

Up until now I’ve been keeping most of these experiments to myself (although some crop up on my Flickr stream from time to time), but I’ve decided to start sharing the processes when I can – so that you can tell me what I’m doing wrong and teach me the right way! Or, if you’re like me and are used to languages like AS3, JavaScript and Processing / Java, but are wanting to take your creative coding into other environments; maybe you can learn a little bit from what I’ve been trying.

Either way, the Noise Sphere experiment, though not particularly original; made me realise that the processes involved spanned many of the key aspects of programming that I’m both interested in but also keen to learn much more about.

The plan is to release a series of relatively quick tutorials, taking you through the process of creating the sketch you can see in the video above (and far beyond, into OpenGL shaders etc) and in doing so cover roughly the following topics:

Setting up Cinder
Geometry: Vectors & Matrices
Movement & Dynamics
Procedural Mesh Generation
OpenGL: GLSL, Vertex & Fragment Shaders

I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert in these topics, in fact in some I’m only just getting started. But my hope is that I can share my discoveries as they happen and pass on knowledge I’ve picked up from the community, in case it helps other developers travelling along similar trajectories to myself. I’ve found a lot of amazing resources for learning, but have often felt that some of them would benefit from being translated for interactive developers such as myself, who come from more of a creative than technical background.

Pester me if part one isn’t out soon!

AS3 Particle Node Sequencer

Soulwire — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 12:31:40 +0000

(You can drag each node and switch off the wander behaviour to create your own compositions).

At Flash on the Beach this year, I had the privilege of seeing Andre Michelle speak. It was great to hear him explain some of his fantastic work behind audiotool and to see and hear some more of his audio experiments.

He also introduced Tonfall, which is an open source AS3 framework designed to get people started with Audio programming in Flash. From the horses mouth; “Tonfall introduces only a vague design of an audio engine and is rather focussed on readability and simplicity than performance optimizations”.

I know that I’m not alone in feeling inspired by what Andre has done for the Flash platform, particularly when it comes to audio, yet lack the knowledge he has invested so much time and hard work in acquiring. The fact that he’s now sharing it with the ret of us for free was more than enough impetus to have a crack at it myself.

So this is my first test with the framework, which although not extensively documented (at the time of writing), was quite easy to pick up and get going with.

This sequencer is based around physical nodes, which connect to produce a variety of tones. There are two types of node, a neuron and a receptor, which are connected by synapses (apologies for the trite analogies). Neurons fire periodically, and if within a certain proximity of a receptor, this message is sent at a fixed speed along the bridging synapse. When the message arrives, the receptor is activated and responds by queuing it’s individual tone within the audio engine. Each receptor owns a randomly assigned note, and each neuron a randomly assigned octave; therefor a receptor will play it’s note in several different octaves depending on which neuron causes it to fire.

The download includes the builds of Tonfall by Andre Michelle and Minimal Comps by Keith Peters that I’m using.

Download: Particle Sequencer

More Music Visualisations

Soulwire — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:07:44 +0000

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.

Bandcamp Music Visualisations

Soulwire — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:24:28 +0000

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!

Disabed Algebra

Soulwire — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:52:13 +0000

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

AS3 Music Visualisation

Soulwire — Mon, 14 May 2007 11:39:57 +0000

A decent computer and lots of volume is recommended.

Well, due to the fear of slipping behind, I felt I better start learning the new Flash language, Actionscript 3, and at first glance, one of the coolest features is definitely the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum function.

This is a quick experiment which uses the spectrum data of a streaming mp3 to trigger animation. Although it dynamically reacts to the beat, there are elements of randomness in this example so the animation / visualisation is different every time.

I’ve seen a few Actionscript 3 visualisations before, though they tend to follow the graphic equaliser tradition, whereas I wanted something a little more creative.

I will release some source code as soon as I have built this into a robust class. I intend to build an easily customisable music visualisation program which can build visualisations from your own graphics with various configurable parameters.

Download: AS3 Audio Visualiser

Have fun, but epileptics beware!

The track is Öngyilkos Vasárnap by Venetian Snares