Stefan Goodchild

Frederik Vanhoutte Generative Art on Flickr

Absolutely loving the latest work from Frederik that popped up on my Flickr Processing Group feed. The neon colour scheme is almost 80’s in feel but it really works for me.

By Way Of An Apology…

…to my mate Marc for letting him down royally and not doing his website for him when I said I probably could I thought I’d at least let you know that his site is up and full of yummy graphic design that he’s done.

Audio DNA Source Code

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Audio Fingerprints

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.

Farewell, Real World. Hello Jiva

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.

Processing Camera Classes

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.

reSonate Live Show at the Masonic Hall, Frome

Resonate is taking over the Masonic Hall in Frome on Wednesday 9th of July as part of the 2008 Frome Festival. This promises to be the biggest and best Resonate so far this year.

My second ever performance of my wonky downtempo live show with added spicy visuals… If you are in the area it would be great to see you there.

More Info Here

Realworld Records New Website Live

Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.

I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!