After some prompting I though I would publish some of my Processing source code to see what people made of it. Probably not the tidiest code out there, but these are essentially sketches so figured it didn’t matter too much.
To make this work you’ll need a few bits from around the internets. First up is the FFTOctaveAnalyser class from Dave Bollinger which you need to put in the root of your sketch directory, then you’ll need to download the Ess library.
Finally you’ll need something like Audacity to split an audio file into it’s left and right channels. Save them as two mono wav files (for some reason AIFF seems to upset it) called <audiofile>.L and <audiofile>.R and pop them in the sketch data directory.
Assuming all this has gone to plan all you need to do is edit the source code on line 4 so the audioFilename variable is the same as the <audiofile> referenced above and click the play button. Give it a second or two (depending on the length of the audio file) and you should see the Audio DNA displayed and find a TIFF version sitting in a folder called ‘out’ in your sketch folder.
Onto the source. The key to this is it’s not real time. It scans the audio file chunk by chunk so in this instance it’s faster than real-time. With some tweaks a similar technique can be used to render out audio reactive Processing sketches that run slower than real-time if that’s your bag.
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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.
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.
It’s day two at my new home - Jiva Technology - following a rousing send off from Real World. My seven years in the Real World were both enjoyable and challenging but we all have to move on at some point and I felt my time was now.
My new home at Jiva is a startup company building web services to help people find other people who can help. The first product is a website called Beanbag Learning and it’s purpose is to help parents find tutors in their local area for their children. Moving the ‘word of mouth’ culture onto the Internet in short if you will.
I’m excited to find out that my first project is an Adobe AIR application built round communication. This is something very interesting to both design and build as the technologies and UI paradigms involved are pretty well defined these days so the basics of the interaction are pretty much in stone and assumed so that leaves all the fun stuff. The details.
Inspired by the feedback from my latest vimeo video I’ve finally got my simple ‘Chase’ and ‘Sphere’ camera classes tidied up and available. Probably not the greatest programming feat of the decade but may help some of you starting out with Processing.
You can see a simplified applet and get the source code here.
If you have any feedback or suggestions to how to improve them please get in touch.
