Adam's Blog
×

Day 30

Friday October 01, 2010
Category: Creative Pact 2010

Last one!

Today I played with spectral flux to change the size of particles across the screen. For each frame of audio a particle is moved from the middle screen. I was surprised how easy spectral flux was and how great it could look.

This link was invaluable.

Screenshot of software. Screenshot of software.

Day 29

Thursday September 30, 2010
Category: Creative Pact 2010

Today I played a bit more with the peakiness function but I went back a simple particle system that will evolve over longer periods of time. I borrowed some of the code from yesterday and tried to make it a bit more gradual and I got some interesting results.

I also spent some time today digging into the Java API and found some nice features of Arrays. Sorting is actually quite a nice algorithm and also fill is a great way to just fill up an array with a value. Hooray for not having to write simple things over and over!

Screenshot of software. Screenshot of software.

Day 28

Wednesday September 29, 2010
Category: Creative Pact 2010

I am getting quite interested in developing some analysis tools for sound in Java. I am wanting to find the ratio of centre frequency to noise. Today I made a crude algorithm that looks for the peak frequency bin and then uses that in a ratio between spectral centroid. If the peak is off from the centroid then you can assume a distribution that is noisier (aka less pitched). The problems with this algorithm is that it is not normalized to volume and that a centroid of fftsize/2 is noise so if there is a peak at this place then you will get erroneous data. That will take me a little while to find a good solution around this but if was a fun thought experiment.

Today's patch uses my peakiness measure to draw big bubbles across the screen. More noisy means more crazy drawing. It is actually responding in generally the right way and is kind of interesting to watch. I will definitely be expanding on this idea.

Also today I left in some comments in the code for things that I tried and abandoned. You can see a bit more into my process with these.

Screenshot of software. Screenshot of software.

Day 27

Monday September 27, 2010
Category: Creative Pact 2010

Another day, another experiment. I tried to resurrect my Spectral Flatness code and I think it is a precision error in the geometric mean. I thought about scaling the FFT values but I will have to go back on the math for that to make sure I don't skew the values the wrong way. For now I have used the arithmetic mean of the spectrum to give me some numbers to play with.

This sketch changes colour at different volumes, currently white for quiet and black for loud, and becomes more animated with noisier spectra (not really but close enough for now). I think I am getting close to something interesting. Maybe once I sleep on it tomorrow will show me the answer.

Screenshot of software. Screenshot of software.

Day 26

Sunday September 26, 2010
Category: Creative Pact 2010

I guess I am at it again. Today I was playing around with an idea for making a spectral centroid visual. I was thinking about FFT displays and I thought that having bars rise and fall isn't all that visually stimulating, though it is accurate for display. So, what I did was map spectral centroid to the location of a directional light in OPENGL and had it point to a line of boxes whose size modulates with the amplitude of the incoming signal. I also reversed the amplitude mapping so that loud sounds create small boxes. It makes for some nice motion.

I also spent some time looking through the Processing.org bug list in reference to some glitchyness in OPENGL as implemented in Processing. There are varying reports about how to smooth out anti-aliasing and threading issues. It seems the best thing to do is to try out all solutions and see which one works for that particular patch. Although the simplest thing to do to avoid the anti-aliasing problem is to only draw vertical or horizontal lines, but who wants to do that?

Screenshot of software. Screenshot of software.

older   →