Archive for the 'code' Category

Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing

Published
by
Peter Kirn
on 9/19/2008
in alternative-interfaces, code, design, experimental, generative, interaction-design, interactive, interactive-music, interfaces, news, open-source, physics, processing.org, programming, research and sequencers
. Closed

Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are exploring right now. Hans Kuder has been sharing a promising-looking project on the CDM forums, built in the code-sketching tool Processing (site | CDMu | CDMo). The idea: explore nodes live and let your sequences float free on the screen.

Hans writes:

tiction - early prototype 1 from Hans Kuder on Vimeo.

tiction is a sequencing / performance application that tries to bridge generative music with live improvisation. With it you can create looping (or one-shot) sequences whose pitch and controller values change based on screen position. When a node fires its event, subtle or not-so-subtle physical interactions take place, giving life to the system.

Tiction v0.1 is now available as a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I’ll be adding updates over the next couple weeks, but most of the useful features are already in place.

This is just a graphical interface; actual sound happens elsewhere, via MIDI. (Hans includes instructions for inter-app MIDI on Mac. On Windows, you should try MIDI-Yoke or Hubi’s MIDI Loopback.)

The video above is slightly older than the release you get, so there’s an extra reason to go grab it.

Free software + code + description/instructions for Mac, Windows, Linux. Version 0.1; expecting more soon!

Tiction @ Tink Thank Software

Before someone else says it, no, the idea here isn’t entirely new. It’s especially reminiscent of the work done by Toshio Iwai, best known recently for his Tenori-On hardware and ElectroPlankton DS software, who had experimented with similar interfaces — though generally minus some of the physics here. But then, we got a lot of mileage out of simple step sequencers, and they’ve evolved a lot. It’ll be interesting to see what new interfaces people can cook up.

Those of you Processing users, one tip. Hans is using the ProMIDI Java library, but there’s a better library evolving called RWMidi from our friends over at Ruin & Wesen, plus a driver that will fix problems with MIDI support and Java on some Macs — check out OSXMidiSPI for OS X (direct download).

Brilliant work, Hans! Readers with feedback, please pipe up since Hans asked for it; otherwise, I’ll be interested to see how this evolves!

One more video:

tiction - early prototype 2 from Hans Kuder on Vimeo.

Radiohead Use Creative Commons for Music Video Data; Visual “Stems” the Next Big Thing?

Published
by
Peter Kirn
on 7/14/2008
in Community, Sampling, audiovisual, av, code, creative-commons, news, open-source, opinion, processing.org, programming, synesthesia, trends and visualization
. Closed

Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and consumes more music than ever.

While that change continues to spread slowly, though, audiovisual remixing could already have a jump start.

Radiohead: Big news for fans of data visualization, the coding tool Processing, and Creative Commons: Radiohead have "shot" their latest video using only 3D scanning devices in place of cameras, and they’ve made source code and the data (in friendly CSV files) free. The whole thing is released under a non-commercial / ShareAlike CC license, which is well-suited to remixes in general.  So, to anyone who was disappointed that Radiohead didn’t use a Creative Commons license for their remix contest, now you’ve gotten something you didn’t even ask for — three-dimensional, animated data of Tom Yorke’s face. And because this is essentially raw data, it’s unusually open to interpretation.

Visual stems? By total coincidence, Create Digital Motion’s Jaymis wonders aloud if the entire A/V scene couldn’t be given a jump start by two obvious (but strangely elusive) decisions: 1. release video "stems" for music videos to give people free access to them, and 2. go get a real visualist. Some artists have done #1, of course, but there wasn’t a specific name given to the result, and they’ve more often than not released full videos — so here you go.

Both stories are covered today on Create Digital Motion:

Radiohead Makes House of Cards Video with 3D Plotting, Processing; Gives You the Data

To The Next Level of AV Remix Culture: It’s Time to Release Music Video “Stems”

But I think it’s well worth asking readers here on CDMusic, too. Music sampling and even remixing may be old news — even if copyright protection remains the norm. But could opening up visual remixes and free visual interpretation re-energize how people think about music?

Of course, this isn’t just for the sake of doing it. Jaymis launched his discussion partly because he wanted something more expressive at a performance, and Radiohead’s CC decision allows them to take an experience that would be pretty limited (a few minutes of cool video) and make it far less so (live data and code remixed by especially-savvy fans). Likewise, the CC license is essential in the latter case; there’s far less incentive to fans to code their own visual software if they can’t share ownership of the result, or — just as importantly — share the resulting code with each other. (The tool the band’s video used, too, wouldn’t even exist without the open source community that created it.)

So, what’s next — particularly if you’re not as famous as Radiohead?