Stefan Goodchild

Audio Fingerprints

Portishead Visualisations

I’ve been tinkering with audio visualisations in Processing for a few years now. The three animated ones I was happy enough with to show I have been adding to Vimeo but the still versions had never seen the light of day apart from glimpses as part of the audio player on this site.

I finally signed up to Flickr and added a few higher res artifacts of the experiments over there as Marc Bessant had posted about them on his blog recently so thought I should out the rest myself. There are two kinds that I’ve done. The ‘Fingerprint’ and the ‘DNA’ styles are very closely linked in terms of back end code but produce very different results.

‘Fingerprint’ was the first one chronologically I wanted to get something organic feeling and at higher resolutions and with the right colour palette they can look almost watercolour like. ‘DNA’ was the offshoot. The result of a conversation with the aforementioned Marc Bessent about creating something to etch onto the empty side of a 12” single release. The release happened, but the band in question didn’t go for the designs. Not sure what was used in it’s place.

Small Pieces

The regular visitor or two I have may notice a new look around these here parts as I’ve finally got round to updating the look of my site and moving it back to a WordPress backend.

Over tonight the audio files and some images may well be missing as they upload on my terrible connection so apologies if things are missing. Hopefully as things calm down I’m actually gonna start putting some posts up but in the meantime you could always look at some of the photos I’ve taken recently and read the occasional tweet I post.

—update—

Content should all be up now and it should be fairly un-borked in IE7. If you use IE6 then to be honest you’ve only got yourselves (or your stalinist IT dept) to blame. Firefox and recent webkit browsers get the rounded corner love, which means I’ve chucked CSS validation out the window and I’ve got a stray p tag that’s appearing as part of the audio players that is breaking HTML validation. Despite this the world turns still upon it’s axis.

I will track it down eventually and squish that little bugger. But not tonight.