I created my first musical recording using the Crystal Audio Unit and Impromptu [download it].

I coded the piece so that all the instruments sync to the same beat (albeit a fairly chaotic beat), and I feel it restricts the sound. However, I like the mid bass sound that wanders on a sin wave and I want to keep that, I also like the kick drum. A fast beating kick has impact, I like that and want to use it again.

I don’t like the randomness of it, particularly how the piece never returns to the same bar. I generated the piece in code, and manually turned things on and off. I’m not sure how much more fun it would be if it was in an interface…

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I could create a music generator for each instrument in the piece and let the user hold the instrument on a generated bar it plays one they like. So the instrument would generate a bar of music, play it, generate a new one play it and on goes the cycle, however while playing a bar the user could choose to stop the generator on that bar and loop on that bar. The user can then do this for each instrument.

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The order of today’s version greatly improves upon randomness of yesterday’s wander.

• Sinusoidal movement was applied to the red and green components of the primary complimentary set.
• The secondary complimentary continued to tag along randomly within a range, greatly exposing the randomness against the beautiful sinusoidal movement of the primary set, so I gave the secondary set sinusoidal movement about the primary set.

Next:

• Apply sinusoidal movement to the secondary set – so that it tags along gracefully.
• Consider how three works could fit together as a triptych;
  1. the first piece as an exploration of colours and shapes (sinusoidal movement – flowing and pleasant) – might drop out in sections where little is happening (all colours the same), consider arranging the grid in a more interesting pattern, such as a fractal like arrangment.
  2. a second using persistence to show participant’s effect (empowers participant with a magical touch) (effects of time like blurring, fading etc)
  3. and a final piece that gives direct control (exposes its mechanics).

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That’s what I get for googling my name!

Interesting Snippet of information – the rewards of the Vacation Scholarship Scheme
Simon Joslin, a final year student in IF90 B CI (COM DESIGN)/B INF TECH received a best paper award from CGIE 2006. The paper was titled Modelling Quest Data for Game Designers. Simon has been asked to submit the paper to the ACMIE journal. Simon was a vacation scholarship student and, according to his supervisors, wrote the paper with little help form them (Ross Brown and Penny Drennan). Congratulations, Simon!

Taken from a QUT newsletter.

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This short experiment has shown that I will need to spend quite some time exploring colour morphing (changing the colours over time) and animation effects (by playing with the colour table):

• I’ve implemented the double complimentary colour selection method.
• first complimentary set has 60% chance of being selected (30% each colour), while other set has 20%, as do b&w.
• i’ve set the primary complimentary set to wander over time, and the secondary set to tag along.
• The colour table maintains the same order and the colours change. Because the colour table doesn’t change, it still looks a little static as the same patterns get generated quite often.
• Furthermore the random walk produces the problem of colour flickering where the colour is randomly wandering backwards and forwards.
• I didn’t actually prevent it from choosing black and white, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary, although it is very possible, it is unlikely. I am more concerned about it choosing several greys, or repeating the same colour multiple times in the colour table.

Next:

• Next I want to try sinusoidal movement, perhaps with an offset wave on each component (r, g ,b).
• And I want to try shifting the order of the colour table.

Video to come.

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I am looking for colour selection methods for pixelbliss (working title):

• http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-schemes.html – Firstly I will try double complimentary in combination with b&w. I’ll need to make sure the 4 chosen colours aren’t b&w as well, and initially I won’t allow more than two greys.

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I need to write some tunes for assessment. No, actually I need to write some code that generates sound… haha nice distinction. That is feasible. In a tutorial a couple weeks back we were shown that almost all western music can be simplified to a set of rules, and therefore a program can use these rules to generate music. I’d still need to be in control of the process, but it means I can give order to what would otherwise just be noise!

I tend to believe the power of generative process flexes most strongly when the technology does the grunt work and the human uses her powerful pattern recognition skills to find anomolies and interesting areas of generated data. I’m sure when you attempt to write code to write music, you end up adjusting your code to get the sound you want, as opposed to letting it run completely wild, so in the end you are crafting the sound anyway, just indirectly.

During the tute we were shown a simple demonstration of these rules. I noticed that amongst all the randomness of the bars of music, many bars were quite aesthetically pleasing. So I’d like to write a generator that lets the user easily keep bars they like and toss bars they don’t.

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Using Impromptu, I am exploring generative processes.

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