Archive for the 'programming' 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.

Ghostss: NIN Video Remix as an Online, Creative Commons-Powered App

Published
by
Peter Kirn
on 9/8/2008
in C++, Community, NIN, PHP, creative-commons, javascript, news, oddities, online, programming, remix, remixing, trends, videos, web, web-2.0 and youtube
. Closed

Online remix contests are all the rage these days. User-generated content is becoming this decade’s latest annoying buzzword. But visualist engineer Marco Hinic took a different approach. He didn’t create one video remix. He created an app that can create endless video remixes. Nine Inch Nails Ghosts, meet random visual mash-ups from Creative Commons-licensed online videos. Marco describes the effort:

A few days ago I released the web site ghostss.com; it’s my entry to the NIN Ghosts Film Festival.

It’s an online video remixing application. It builds playlists describing a mix of videos with effects and renders them as an .flv Flash Video file. All the content is on the web site — around 1 gig of video loops and a few mp3’s from NIN music.

In accordance to NIN music, all Videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

The web site is a mix of c++, php and javascript for the client side. Basically the client builds a playlist with video references and effects, the playlist is translated into an xml request that is sent to the web site. The video mixer on the web site render the request into an flv or mp4 file that is then played to the client.

Yep, you read that right: it’s a website coded in C++.

Where would an engineer appear with the technical chops to do such a thing? Well, as you might think, only a select few do. As it happens, Marco is behind one of the most influential desktop VJ apps available today.

I am the founder of ArKaos so I do play with pixels since so many years, I started working on video mixing software around 1992.

This is a new technology I am currently working on at ArKaos.

I think that we are close to the point were the web will be more than just used to share video and this is an example.

I could even allow people to upload some clips or customize some texts but because I have a lot of work at ArKaos so I did limit the human interaction to tweaking the settings.

Marco is actually CEO of ArKaos, as well as the engineer of its engine. Regular readers are of course very familiar with ArKaos, but I hope we attract the occasional reader to whom this is new; if that’s the case, go check out the software we’re talking about. (ArKaos are also working on a new generation of their software entitled GrandVJ.)

This brings up an interesting point, though. People are fond of hyping the blurring divide between Web and desktop apps. But they are too often focused only on the Web side, and only on ways in which Web apps are superficially becoming more like offline or “desktop” apps. The “rich” in “rich client,” by contrast, may involve elements just like the hard-core video processing seen in this app. Too often, those involved only in Web development obsess over tiny details of text rendering and UI and miss out on the media processing power modern computers have. It’ll be interesting to see that start to shift; I think the addition of more rich capabilities is inevitable.

Marco probably has a deeper perspective on this than I do, though, so Marco, we’ll have to talk about that at some point!

In the meantime, go play with remixing Millions of Ghosts of user-uploaded video. The results have an eerily ghostly quality about them, I have to admit. (And, of course, our goal as VJs and visualists is to try not to look like we’re a random algorithm arbitrarily mixing video content!)

http://ghostss.com/

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?