I am finding now that I am making massive jumps from one idea to another again, simply because of the amount of new information that I am finding out. However today I feel like I have turned a corner in terms of the direction that I want to take.
Proccessing is a programming language primarily aimed at creating visuals and graphics, though this is certainly not all you can do with the platform. I feel like this is a strong platform for me to work from based upon the research I have done on it.
During my research I have stumbled upon people using a library within processing called Minim,which enables the capture of FFT data for use in Processing. I also managed to find a short series of tutrorial's from a user named "Switchboard" on Vimeo, which show how to get some basic functionality coming from within Processing.
Switchboards Vimeo Channel
Over the next few days I am going to work through his tutorials and try to get a better grasp of what is happening in the programming language itself.
I feel like my "Scope" is narrowing now. I certainly feel like between Processing and M4L I will be able to achieve the creation of graphics from audio, which was has been the main aim of my project for some time now.
From hear on in, I will be concentrating on music visualization using M4L and Processing, with the aim being to create an application for studio use, both in a creative sense and for use as a clinical audio measurement device, using FFT spectral analysis.
Thursday 30 October 2014
Monday 27 October 2014
Technical Research Contact
In my hunt for any good explanation of how FFT works, I stumbled upon this page..
Gamma Devices - Metering
I have contact the man behind the devices via Blogger, hopefully he will be able to give me some advice on where to gather the information needed for me to build a device capable of converting Frequency to Colour.
Above is the video link for the "Gamma Devices M-Series". I am curious as to the build of the Graphic EQ style display, as this maybe the best way to gather individual frequency data and send it out to be processed into colour.
Gamma Devices - Metering
I have contact the man behind the devices via Blogger, hopefully he will be able to give me some advice on where to gather the information needed for me to build a device capable of converting Frequency to Colour.
Above is the video link for the "Gamma Devices M-Series". I am curious as to the build of the Graphic EQ style display, as this maybe the best way to gather individual frequency data and send it out to be processed into colour.
Wednesday 22 October 2014
History of the "Colour Organ"
As suspected, not only am I not the first person to have concieved of the idea of generating colour from sound, the idea has infact been around for centuries.
Colour Organs through the Ages
"Around 1742, Castel proposed the construction of a clavecin oculaire, a light-organ, as a new musical instrument which would simultaneously produce both sound and the "correct" associated color for each note."
The first point of interest for me, is that the concentration was not on the complete keyboard. Without exception, the men behind the incarnations of various colour organs through the ages have concentrated on mapping the colours to Key; C is always red for example, rather than my former idea where the lowest register was entirely represented by one colour, blending as we move up through the registers.
As we can see from the graphic above, no clear concensus have ever been reached for which note should fit which colour. We can also see that some pretty big names have had a shot at it, which I did not expect to see! Namely Newton & Helmholtz, two men without whom I certainly would not be sitting here writing this!
Ill save my explanations for anotherr post, but lets just say just now I have those who I can understand and those who I can't. Or perhaps it's those who's colour choices I like and dislike... hmmm. I will say this though, from a logical implementaion standpoint, Vishnogradsky's spectrum stands above the rest, simply by using the sharps as gradient keys between the whole tone colours.
Having thought about it, certainly from an accuracy standpoint, this could be a better idea for me. It is also encouraging to me that this was something of great fascination in days gone by. I can imagine in the 1700's this would have been pretty cool! There is also a trend for taking idea from the past and reinventing them for today. These were intended for beauty; if I can add accuracy to that equation then I feel I'm onto a winning idea.
"And dark and light colors do actually have effects which are comparable to low and high musical tones. Dark colors are sonorous, powerful, mightly like deep tones. But light colors, like those of the Impressionists, act, when they alone make up a whole work, with the magic of high voices: floating, light, youthful, carefree, and probably cool too." Karl Gerstner, The Forms of Color 1986.
Colour Organs through the Ages
"Around 1742, Castel proposed the construction of a clavecin oculaire, a light-organ, as a new musical instrument which would simultaneously produce both sound and the "correct" associated color for each note."
The first point of interest for me, is that the concentration was not on the complete keyboard. Without exception, the men behind the incarnations of various colour organs through the ages have concentrated on mapping the colours to Key; C is always red for example, rather than my former idea where the lowest register was entirely represented by one colour, blending as we move up through the registers.
As we can see from the graphic above, no clear concensus have ever been reached for which note should fit which colour. We can also see that some pretty big names have had a shot at it, which I did not expect to see! Namely Newton & Helmholtz, two men without whom I certainly would not be sitting here writing this!
Ill save my explanations for anotherr post, but lets just say just now I have those who I can understand and those who I can't. Or perhaps it's those who's colour choices I like and dislike... hmmm. I will say this though, from a logical implementaion standpoint, Vishnogradsky's spectrum stands above the rest, simply by using the sharps as gradient keys between the whole tone colours.
Having thought about it, certainly from an accuracy standpoint, this could be a better idea for me. It is also encouraging to me that this was something of great fascination in days gone by. I can imagine in the 1700's this would have been pretty cool! There is also a trend for taking idea from the past and reinventing them for today. These were intended for beauty; if I can add accuracy to that equation then I feel I'm onto a winning idea.
"And dark and light colors do actually have effects which are comparable to low and high musical tones. Dark colors are sonorous, powerful, mightly like deep tones. But light colors, like those of the Impressionists, act, when they alone make up a whole work, with the magic of high voices: floating, light, youthful, carefree, and probably cool too." Karl Gerstner, The Forms of Color 1986.
Monday 20 October 2014
Colour to Frequency - The Light Side
So there is another side to this equation, that I touched on earlier. time to get into it a little bit deeper.
Wavelength to Colour Converter
Website - Colour Science
The first link is pretty much what it says on the tin. The science behind it is explained in the next link, all you need know to play is this - enter a value between 380nm and 780nm...
The second is some preisting science, explaining the mapping of colours throught their frequency spectrum.
As with audio, light and the colours contained within exist in their own spectrum. We can think of this as a little window of perception for us. Vibrations of atoms with a frequency between 20HZ and 20KHZ are known to us as sound, that we percieve with our ears (mostly). In exactly the same way, we percieve light with our eyes, with the colour seperated by its wave frequency. Now there is "slightly" more to it all than I am getting into just now and I am certainly not a physicist. I guess the fact that light exists as a wave and a particle at the same time would be one! Anyways, this is not relevant just now.
The colours seperate out 380nm and 780nm. nm stands for nanometers. When combined into this equation, you can work out the frequency of light waves, pretty cool huh!?
The Relationship Between Speed, Frequency and Wavelength
As the article points out, this equation shows that, in order for us to percieve a medium red colour, 448,000,000,000,000 photon wavecrests pass over our retinas, every single second. 448 TRILLION HERTZ. That's 448Bil every millisecond. 448Mil every nanosecond.
Almost to much to take in, huh? Well, not for your brain. Infact, our brains decoded that, along with every other frequency of colour hitting our eyes, with amazing accuracy. At the same time as running your whole audio perception system, your body, and itself. Unbelievable...
Anyways, the bottom line is this. Frequency and vibration is integral to everything in the Universe. Sound and light are one. As with sound, light has lower and upper registers, harmonics and octaves. 20HZ converts to Red
We exist in a constantly evolving orchestra of light, my mission for this project is to try and reinvigerate the project studio, in a universal way!
Wavelength to Colour Converter
Website - Colour Science
The first link is pretty much what it says on the tin. The science behind it is explained in the next link, all you need know to play is this - enter a value between 380nm and 780nm...
The second is some preisting science, explaining the mapping of colours throught their frequency spectrum.
As with audio, light and the colours contained within exist in their own spectrum. We can think of this as a little window of perception for us. Vibrations of atoms with a frequency between 20HZ and 20KHZ are known to us as sound, that we percieve with our ears (mostly). In exactly the same way, we percieve light with our eyes, with the colour seperated by its wave frequency. Now there is "slightly" more to it all than I am getting into just now and I am certainly not a physicist. I guess the fact that light exists as a wave and a particle at the same time would be one! Anyways, this is not relevant just now.
The colours seperate out 380nm and 780nm. nm stands for nanometers. When combined into this equation, you can work out the frequency of light waves, pretty cool huh!?
The Relationship Between Speed, Frequency and Wavelength
As the article points out, this equation shows that, in order for us to percieve a medium red colour, 448,000,000,000,000 photon wavecrests pass over our retinas, every single second. 448 TRILLION HERTZ. That's 448Bil every millisecond. 448Mil every nanosecond.
Almost to much to take in, huh? Well, not for your brain. Infact, our brains decoded that, along with every other frequency of colour hitting our eyes, with amazing accuracy. At the same time as running your whole audio perception system, your body, and itself. Unbelievable...
Anyways, the bottom line is this. Frequency and vibration is integral to everything in the Universe. Sound and light are one. As with sound, light has lower and upper registers, harmonics and octaves. 20HZ converts to Red
We exist in a constantly evolving orchestra of light, my mission for this project is to try and reinvigerate the project studio, in a universal way!
Spectrum Lab
So as a continuation from last night, I found this fantastic little program called "Spectrum Lab", that takes real time audio information and runs an FFT process on it, in order to generate a colour mapped frequency analyser. Further more, you can adjust the colour spectrum, threshhold points and frequency response, allowing a pretty large range of displays and graph types. Here is a link to the Website, with a couple of screen grab so you get the idea.
Spectrum Lab
If nothing else, this program demonstrates clearly that others have had similar thought processes (and have been capable of actually making them happen). It is also going to be invaluable in helping me explain the project to people I may have to consult in future; I can easily convey the ways in which I would ideally change this system in order to do what I want to do in the studio environment.
I have already touched on the fact Max/MSP can do FFT proccessing along with modernised varients, so the question is now, how can I utilise prexisting Max/MSP objects to recreate a slicker, graphically focused version of what you see above? Also, how can a get it out of the computer Real-Time? As cool as Spectrum Lab is, it is old. Their idea of real-time back then is perhpas not quite what I understand real-time to mean, so streamlining the process would seem to be important.
At this point, I think I can safely say that no matter what path my research leads me down in terms of production, I will be using Ableton as the Hub. There are many reasons behind this. It is the "Musicians DAW" (though a lot of others would lay claim to this, too). It has seemless Max/MSP integration and I can also feed a range of software from it very simply by comparison to others. Finally, it runs on both Mac and PC, though I will be building this project on the Mac side first - there are some objects that only exist on the Mac version of Max/MSP that
Sunday 19 October 2014
Researching Alternatives to Arduino
I have found out something very important this week - YouTube is not the place to look for exciting new artistic projects. It seems like Vimeo is the place to be for them!
What exciting artistic project are you talking about in particular, I hear you cry.... Well, this.
Madmapper to DMX/LED
There might be some interesting developments around the corner for splitting out audio frequency information neatly & quickly, but for the time being we are just going to have to stick with filterbanks splitting it all up. In short I am not going to be attempting to do things in Max for Live that nobody has ever tried before, simply because I dont have the skill and it would take the whole year just to learn enough to start.
I am very comfortable with signal flow processing, if not coding, however. As you can see from the link above, this process is majoritivly in the box and predefined in how to set up, I just want to expand the idea.
It clearly allows me to use MadMapper to set up a means of splitting out the audio frequencies to control seperate sets of LED's, which is what I have been looking for the whole time.
I figure that if I get this working, I will have a much stronger understanding, along with all the components I need, to experiment with how to get a smart means of integration into a working enviroment.
This is on top of the fact that MadMapper also can run my projector, so I can perhaps experiment with more generative graphics running onto a screen, along with LED's. I found this the other day which blew my mind!
Sound Reacting 3D Waveform Generator.
If I could develop a means of having it change its colour spectrum in tandem with the LED's, whilst at the same time generating a waveform representation, I feel it would really bring the idea of metering music alive. Something that is normally such a boring process being turned into something that is integral and enjoyable can only be a positive thing, surely!?
Not to mention beautiful. Which can be inspirational in itself. Hopefully the outcome will result in a room that you want to create music in more, a room you want to be in all the time.
2D Standing Wave Visualiser
Something I may touch on later in the year once I have got the techy part of the project sorted, are other forms of audio reactivity, as you can see above.
What exciting artistic project are you talking about in particular, I hear you cry.... Well, this.
Madmapper to DMX/LED
There might be some interesting developments around the corner for splitting out audio frequency information neatly & quickly, but for the time being we are just going to have to stick with filterbanks splitting it all up. In short I am not going to be attempting to do things in Max for Live that nobody has ever tried before, simply because I dont have the skill and it would take the whole year just to learn enough to start.
I am very comfortable with signal flow processing, if not coding, however. As you can see from the link above, this process is majoritivly in the box and predefined in how to set up, I just want to expand the idea.
It clearly allows me to use MadMapper to set up a means of splitting out the audio frequencies to control seperate sets of LED's, which is what I have been looking for the whole time.
I figure that if I get this working, I will have a much stronger understanding, along with all the components I need, to experiment with how to get a smart means of integration into a working enviroment.
This is on top of the fact that MadMapper also can run my projector, so I can perhaps experiment with more generative graphics running onto a screen, along with LED's. I found this the other day which blew my mind!
Sound Reacting 3D Waveform Generator.
If I could develop a means of having it change its colour spectrum in tandem with the LED's, whilst at the same time generating a waveform representation, I feel it would really bring the idea of metering music alive. Something that is normally such a boring process being turned into something that is integral and enjoyable can only be a positive thing, surely!?
Not to mention beautiful. Which can be inspirational in itself. Hopefully the outcome will result in a room that you want to create music in more, a room you want to be in all the time.
2D Standing Wave Visualiser
Something I may touch on later in the year once I have got the techy part of the project sorted, are other forms of audio reactivity, as you can see above.
Sunday 12 October 2014
Contextualising my Project.
So in light of the fact I have no decided which path I am going to follow, I feel it's important for me to shed some light on why I am choosing to do what I am doing and what benefit I feel can be gained from this.
I would say it is fairly obvious that anyone on this course is interested in audio and music; we wouldn't be here otherwise. However, we all have different motivations in being here, different paths that we want to follow afterwards.
In understanding the path I want to follow afterwards, it's important to understand the one I have been walking on upto this point. Through school I played the Piano lightly, the Tuba to grade 4 (weird, I know) and tried my hand at most others. However as with most kids of my age at that time, computer games were becoming more and more prevelant in my life, not to mention the push at my school to do sports and my love of Tennis. Though both my Grandparents are concert grade Pianists, neither of my parents play anything, despite loving music itself. So the intent I had to learn an instrument was easily ignored for addictive games and other than the occasional "How is your Piano practise coming along?" from my Grandparents, there really wasn't much push to keep it up from anywhere else.
Fast forward 7 or 8 years and school is nearly over, with adolesence well under way. I discover DJing with my friends from School and frankly, all the culture that goes with it. Music is in my family, even if it skipped a generation. When I discovered that you didn't have to "get grades" in order to perform and, in a certain sense, create music, my mind was blown. I was obsessed with DJing and Dance Music in a way I had never been about anything in my life. This was before I had ever even stepped foot in a nightclub...
Needless to say, the deal was sealed on the first clubbing experience. To this day, it is still the clearest image I have of "clubbing" in my mind, the purest it has even been. Now don't get me wrong, I was wasted; some of the grandure could have been imagined. It is a clear image though, even if partially imagined, associated with a feeling that is only describable as love.
Fast forward again to today. Here I am sitting on my computer, in my bedroom. Though I am writing my blog just now, later this evening I will turn to my DAW to start writing electronic dance music. For a while though, I have felt like making music is a sterile process... It is extremely easy to become distracted - surf the web in other words. It certainly feels nothing like a club, regardless how loud I turn it up. A club is all about sensory saturation. It's a mixture of frequencies coming together, both light and audio spectrums, in order to transport you to another place. A place that is a million miles away from where I am sat just now.
So the question is how can you bring the club vibe into the studio situation, in a way that doesn't require everybody to be a lighting engineer/VJ. In the same way that the Subpac (3rd blog post) has brought the club into the studio for the audio spectrum, I am looking to answer the question for the lighting side of the equation. At the Honours presentation, I want people to be le to play their favourite tune in a darkened room, which is reacting to what they put into the system with light. Light that is consistently changing colour in tandem with the musics frequency spectrum, in order to bring a far more imersive experience to the listener.
From a testing standpoint, I want to see if it can be developed to the accuracy required to be useful as a mixing and engineering tool and the most useful implementation of audio reactive lights. By examining the excitment and drive to produce more music, along with their opinions on usefulness as a tool, I should be able to determine whether or not light can become an integral part of the music making experience for producers.
I would say it is fairly obvious that anyone on this course is interested in audio and music; we wouldn't be here otherwise. However, we all have different motivations in being here, different paths that we want to follow afterwards.
In understanding the path I want to follow afterwards, it's important to understand the one I have been walking on upto this point. Through school I played the Piano lightly, the Tuba to grade 4 (weird, I know) and tried my hand at most others. However as with most kids of my age at that time, computer games were becoming more and more prevelant in my life, not to mention the push at my school to do sports and my love of Tennis. Though both my Grandparents are concert grade Pianists, neither of my parents play anything, despite loving music itself. So the intent I had to learn an instrument was easily ignored for addictive games and other than the occasional "How is your Piano practise coming along?" from my Grandparents, there really wasn't much push to keep it up from anywhere else.
Fast forward 7 or 8 years and school is nearly over, with adolesence well under way. I discover DJing with my friends from School and frankly, all the culture that goes with it. Music is in my family, even if it skipped a generation. When I discovered that you didn't have to "get grades" in order to perform and, in a certain sense, create music, my mind was blown. I was obsessed with DJing and Dance Music in a way I had never been about anything in my life. This was before I had ever even stepped foot in a nightclub...
Needless to say, the deal was sealed on the first clubbing experience. To this day, it is still the clearest image I have of "clubbing" in my mind, the purest it has even been. Now don't get me wrong, I was wasted; some of the grandure could have been imagined. It is a clear image though, even if partially imagined, associated with a feeling that is only describable as love.
Fast forward again to today. Here I am sitting on my computer, in my bedroom. Though I am writing my blog just now, later this evening I will turn to my DAW to start writing electronic dance music. For a while though, I have felt like making music is a sterile process... It is extremely easy to become distracted - surf the web in other words. It certainly feels nothing like a club, regardless how loud I turn it up. A club is all about sensory saturation. It's a mixture of frequencies coming together, both light and audio spectrums, in order to transport you to another place. A place that is a million miles away from where I am sat just now.
So the question is how can you bring the club vibe into the studio situation, in a way that doesn't require everybody to be a lighting engineer/VJ. In the same way that the Subpac (3rd blog post) has brought the club into the studio for the audio spectrum, I am looking to answer the question for the lighting side of the equation. At the Honours presentation, I want people to be le to play their favourite tune in a darkened room, which is reacting to what they put into the system with light. Light that is consistently changing colour in tandem with the musics frequency spectrum, in order to bring a far more imersive experience to the listener.
From a testing standpoint, I want to see if it can be developed to the accuracy required to be useful as a mixing and engineering tool and the most useful implementation of audio reactive lights. By examining the excitment and drive to produce more music, along with their opinions on usefulness as a tool, I should be able to determine whether or not light can become an integral part of the music making experience for producers.
Friday 10 October 2014
First Progress Meeting
As I mentioned yesterday, I was looking forward to having a chance to chat with James. I wasn't disappointed tbh!
I have certainly come away with some confidence that wasn't there before. I also got a clear impression of which project he thought had legs, and tbh it was the one I knew it would be.
So back to audio reactive lights I go. However I realised today that I have been missing a whole range of possible applications and methods to achieve the project and the uses for the system.
Certainly, environmental testing of musicians in environments is the most obvious, however dependant on my progress I could push the idea further.
Generative graphics were a topic that was raised during the meeting and it was certainly a way I had thought of achieving the colour to frequency mapping. This technique can be shifted in order to generate a whole range of parameters for generating randomised patterns and colours etc. You can have image-change parameters shift on transient detection; you can change many more parameters infact when using a program such as Resolume Arena to control your projections. There are too many to mention just here frankly.
So I am going to do a rough draft of the aims of the project as I see them just now, so I have a reference point for the future.
1. To create an environment that is capable of reacting to audio dynamically, through the use of FFT/Spectral Analysis techniques, in order to map the the colour balance, hue and intensity of LED lights, or the visual content of a projector(s) mapped within a room.
2. To test both common platforms of audio analysis currently in use, Max/MSP/M4L & Arduino, in order to find the most suitable platform for deconstruction of audio information into usable data for control of lighting/projection systems.
3. To find the most efficient way of transmitting the information needed to activate the lights. Possible methods include direct micing of the environment, line level signal transmitted from the audio stream, MIDI to DMX conversion.
4. To test a range of scenarios for possible use of the system, with focus on studio production, mixing and mastering scenarios, in order to establish a consensus of it's use for the purpose intended; there is a possibility that in the studio environmental activity is not wanted/useful. It could be that for certain types of music it is more applicable than others. These can all be tested using scientific double blind testing on the producer community already exisiting within Abertay.
5. To test the positioning of dynamic lighting within the environment. Can splitting the stereo positioning of the image in the room aid/engage the producer or mix engineer in a more pronounced way with the audio? Dependant on the results, this could be proved to be a mix enhancing tool.
There are a number of other applications that this could be useful, including nightclubs & festivals, theaters, bars. You could have your bathroom lights react dynamically to the sound of splashing in the water, or just a great addition to a bedroom soundsystem for listening....
So now it's time to get started properly, over the weekend I am going to find a range of texts that I can get on both Max and Arduino. This is the most pressing issue I have, as my knowledge base of both these platforms needs to expand fast. At the start of the week I will also be buying my Arduino; I understand there are a fair few and some reviews need to be watched to make the best choice on which one to buy. Dependent on what my research over the weekend yields I may also go ahead and buy a bread board and a strip of LED's and the basic tools I will need. There is no point in holding back with this, the sooner I get this stuff the sooner I will know how to use it. I have found over my time in education, immediated and practicle application of the knowledge I have been given/found is the way I learn best.
I have certainly come away with some confidence that wasn't there before. I also got a clear impression of which project he thought had legs, and tbh it was the one I knew it would be.
So back to audio reactive lights I go. However I realised today that I have been missing a whole range of possible applications and methods to achieve the project and the uses for the system.
Certainly, environmental testing of musicians in environments is the most obvious, however dependant on my progress I could push the idea further.
Generative graphics were a topic that was raised during the meeting and it was certainly a way I had thought of achieving the colour to frequency mapping. This technique can be shifted in order to generate a whole range of parameters for generating randomised patterns and colours etc. You can have image-change parameters shift on transient detection; you can change many more parameters infact when using a program such as Resolume Arena to control your projections. There are too many to mention just here frankly.
So I am going to do a rough draft of the aims of the project as I see them just now, so I have a reference point for the future.
1. To create an environment that is capable of reacting to audio dynamically, through the use of FFT/Spectral Analysis techniques, in order to map the the colour balance, hue and intensity of LED lights, or the visual content of a projector(s) mapped within a room.
2. To test both common platforms of audio analysis currently in use, Max/MSP/M4L & Arduino, in order to find the most suitable platform for deconstruction of audio information into usable data for control of lighting/projection systems.
3. To find the most efficient way of transmitting the information needed to activate the lights. Possible methods include direct micing of the environment, line level signal transmitted from the audio stream, MIDI to DMX conversion.
4. To test a range of scenarios for possible use of the system, with focus on studio production, mixing and mastering scenarios, in order to establish a consensus of it's use for the purpose intended; there is a possibility that in the studio environmental activity is not wanted/useful. It could be that for certain types of music it is more applicable than others. These can all be tested using scientific double blind testing on the producer community already exisiting within Abertay.
5. To test the positioning of dynamic lighting within the environment. Can splitting the stereo positioning of the image in the room aid/engage the producer or mix engineer in a more pronounced way with the audio? Dependant on the results, this could be proved to be a mix enhancing tool.
There are a number of other applications that this could be useful, including nightclubs & festivals, theaters, bars. You could have your bathroom lights react dynamically to the sound of splashing in the water, or just a great addition to a bedroom soundsystem for listening....
So now it's time to get started properly, over the weekend I am going to find a range of texts that I can get on both Max and Arduino. This is the most pressing issue I have, as my knowledge base of both these platforms needs to expand fast. At the start of the week I will also be buying my Arduino; I understand there are a fair few and some reviews need to be watched to make the best choice on which one to buy. Dependent on what my research over the weekend yields I may also go ahead and buy a bread board and a strip of LED's and the basic tools I will need. There is no point in holding back with this, the sooner I get this stuff the sooner I will know how to use it. I have found over my time in education, immediated and practicle application of the knowledge I have been given/found is the way I learn best.
Thursday 9 October 2014
More Ideas - Acoustic/Musical Sculpture.
So over the last while I have done yet more thinking, in particular again about what would be useful after university; I want my project to be appealing to employers or relevant to self employment.
I also was reminded of this video that I saw way back at the start of my time at Abertay, something that blew my mind & that I was thinking about for some time after.
This falls into a fair number of my catagories. It's musical, it involves building & art. It would also be fantastic for the honours presentation if I could design af few instruments over the year. I will have to research lots of maths and acoustics, not to mention the history of musical instruments and indeed what defines a musical instrument. I this sense I think it would be a fascinating and worthwhile project.
A few of the main objectives I may face for this are more practicle than anything though. I already know that I will need tols and space to work, which can be tricky and costly at best. Some of the techniques I would have to undertake I believe actually involve licences, such as welding. Obviously crafting wooden instruments and other materials is possible. I have a meeting to discuss possiblities with James tomorrow so I will wait to see what he thinks of this path.
I also just tonight found this amazing company that specialise in interesting acoustic designs, for diffusion panels, which once again brought me back to the interactivity between art and sound.
ZR - Sample Rate 8 Bit Diffuser
I have also been continuing my research and practise with M4L, as regardless of whether I deem it to be a wise choice/neccessary for use in my Honours, I want to learn it and I will need this knowledge if I do end up going down that route. I am now t the stage where I can move around the program with ease and get very basic signal flow, however there are still some aspects that are unknown and rather daunting to say the least. Onwards and upwards, so they say....
I also was reminded of this video that I saw way back at the start of my time at Abertay, something that blew my mind & that I was thinking about for some time after.
This falls into a fair number of my catagories. It's musical, it involves building & art. It would also be fantastic for the honours presentation if I could design af few instruments over the year. I will have to research lots of maths and acoustics, not to mention the history of musical instruments and indeed what defines a musical instrument. I this sense I think it would be a fascinating and worthwhile project.
A few of the main objectives I may face for this are more practicle than anything though. I already know that I will need tols and space to work, which can be tricky and costly at best. Some of the techniques I would have to undertake I believe actually involve licences, such as welding. Obviously crafting wooden instruments and other materials is possible. I have a meeting to discuss possiblities with James tomorrow so I will wait to see what he thinks of this path.
I also just tonight found this amazing company that specialise in interesting acoustic designs, for diffusion panels, which once again brought me back to the interactivity between art and sound.
ZR - Sample Rate 8 Bit Diffuser
I have also been continuing my research and practise with M4L, as regardless of whether I deem it to be a wise choice/neccessary for use in my Honours, I want to learn it and I will need this knowledge if I do end up going down that route. I am now t the stage where I can move around the program with ease and get very basic signal flow, however there are still some aspects that are unknown and rather daunting to say the least. Onwards and upwards, so they say....
Sunday 5 October 2014
Other ideas
It funny how doing the research on this is starting to cause me to rethink everything, again and again. Not just in the sense of the project, but in terms of what I want to do with the rest of my life. Profound stuff indeed!
I think it would be useful for me to clarify in my own my mind the things I love doing. I am a strong believer that if you love what you do you will be successful in life. More over, you will be useful and productive.
It's this ethos that led me to the idea of colour to frequency conversion as a project, as this could be useful for use in the festival circuit that I am a part of. However the reality is that thinking slightly into the future, running about sorting out rigs and lights whilst getting messy in fields is perhaps something I want to be more a part of on the performance side rather than the organisation side.
The whole reason behind me getting involved with a festival crew was so that I would get to play out on a big system to lots of people.
Anyways, back to the list.
Loves/Passions
From an inspirational point of view, this week I did see a few things that have given me some ideas, but nothing concrete
This is a very cool idea, though I think it would be unachievable for me to undetake anything like this, the idea of surround sound in dance music is obviously being taken a lot more seriously.
Anyways, enough rambling for today, I haven;t really got anywhere with this today, but Im just having one of those days.
I think it would be useful for me to clarify in my own my mind the things I love doing. I am a strong believer that if you love what you do you will be successful in life. More over, you will be useful and productive.
It's this ethos that led me to the idea of colour to frequency conversion as a project, as this could be useful for use in the festival circuit that I am a part of. However the reality is that thinking slightly into the future, running about sorting out rigs and lights whilst getting messy in fields is perhaps something I want to be more a part of on the performance side rather than the organisation side.
The whole reason behind me getting involved with a festival crew was so that I would get to play out on a big system to lots of people.
Anyways, back to the list.
Loves/Passions
- Studio Work - Production Skills, DAW work, Music Production
- Synthesis
- Electronic Performance
- Critical Listening
- Music Business
From an inspirational point of view, this week I did see a few things that have given me some ideas, but nothing concrete
This is a very cool idea, though I think it would be unachievable for me to undetake anything like this, the idea of surround sound in dance music is obviously being taken a lot more seriously.
Anyways, enough rambling for today, I haven;t really got anywhere with this today, but Im just having one of those days.
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