Audio Painting pt. 3

Another version of the audio Painter I’ve made, uses concentric colored circles (choosing colors much the same way as the other audio painters) and lets the user paint with mouse input the direction of the resulting image.

me whistling the beggining of "scars of time"

With this software, i wanted to make a visualization of different phonemes with the sounds they make. I speak Spanish natively (it shows, doesn’t it?) which thankfully does not have as many phonemes as English, so every letter was painted with… audio input of me pronouncing the main pronunciation of every letter (some have two… and h is mute but… i pronounced it as an aspired ‘j’)… so this visualization ends up being pretty interesting since the letters associate looks with each other, and those which are alike (which I pronounce the same) can easily be seen.

The Spanish alphabeth

This visualization is affected by human error (namely me). but… i find it interesting anyway :P

Branches, hairballs and stuff.

In recursion, you always end up feeling tempted to do some trees, or at least some branching traces of sorts. I made this little branching class and ended up drawing generative hairballs.

For applet goodness click here

Those hairballs draw themselves by tracing, but the branches are not animated or anything, so i extended the class a bit so that they had movement and traced themselves. the movement was implemented by offsetting the value of the noise function so that they had a continuous organic-looking movement… and looked lie flagella. After that, i felt like turning that into some text animation by selecting an image map as source for the growth of the branches.

Nice thing about coding: you can connect whatever input you can read to whatever attribute you control. take that … whatever compositing/motion graphics software is reading this… I love 3d on maya, where attributes are so easily connected and mapped. I wish for a compositing software with such power.

Flocking Music Painter test,

or when mixing things starts getting messy

Well, when i had several unfinished projects comes the time when I’m feeling tempted to mix them. So I took my Colored waveforms and mixed them with my flocking thingies… Completely ignoring audio levels and taking in account the tone frequencies converted in colors, turned the flock into a random number of bugs joined by lines that followed the mouse on click resulting in an audio colored flocking brush.

Cicatriz ESP chorus, sang by... me.

Also it turned into an interesting opportunity to try and write to se what kind of typographic artifacts would appear.

My Name, Also known as "i didn't sleep last night"

It’s pretty lovely to have a brush changing it’s color depending on input. Eventually I made a painting tool which could be controlled by singing or whistling. Eventually I will upload a video demo of how it works.

Flocking Things

Going deeper into particle systems and that sort of things. I was thinking on steering wills, which would be a different force that would be applied to a particle inside a system. Being stubborn, I didn’t feel like using someone else’s library but wanted to make my own little bugs which would be working as a Flocking particle system.

For applet goodness click here

For some reason i do not understand at all, flocking and crowd management plug-ins exist in 3d applications but not in Motion Graphics/Compositing applications… since i saw Robert Hodgin’s birds, it had become an obsession for me to use flocks,  and schools as motion graphic tools.

As an antecedent, the classic flocking logic and algorithms come from the Craig Reinold’s Boids which implement rules for steering based on cohesion, separation and alignment. So I started by using those rules and for the sake of interactivity and the so needed control added a “follow” behavior to make my little bugs follow the mouse.

This was a 2d project since at the time, my 3d programming skills were very lame -and still are-.

This was a challenging project since there is a new problem with this kind of ‘force’ being applied to a particle system, and is the fact that every particle has to check every other particle to know what force will be applied to it… and i had no idea how to solve this. Obviously, the solution was to pass the whole array of particles as a parameter when calling the update function for every particle and looping trough it to check which particles where close to the current one and finally compute the steering will for the current particle.

In my example, and for the sake of a nicer visualization, i made the local flock-mates visible by connecting lines, Red for avoiding and black for cohesion… i ended up ignoring the alignment desire since it probed itself useless when introducing a forced follow desire.

I also tried some cumulative results for the flock behavior and used the flock of particles to draw simple images, the results are not very predictable, but with a small group of particles and their joined lines, making every click a single stroke, very interesting results are possible.

Interesting results

In the future i hope to implement a 3d version of this and probably add more behaviors for the steering will force.

Very Recently i made some changes to the code to make it draw stuff and hence for typographic experiments. I hope to enhance it a lot soon.