LonelyStreets.com

My Spores

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Spore Creature Creator lately.  For those who don’t know, it’s basically a mini-game released a couple months ago to get people ramped up for Spore, the new Will Wright game that will be released next week.  The Creature Creator is amazing in how simply it implements 3D modelling - somwthing that is usually very hard and requires immense skill.  Within the (admitedly ver limited) scope of the game however, the creature creator is really amazing.

Anyway, one of the things the Creature Creator comes with is a web widget for you to show off all you creations.  So here it is!

August 30th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Visualizations, Uncategorized | No Comments »  

Data Viz

This may not be the most innovative data viz you’ve ever seen, but I think the following visualization I did of my musical listening habits for my Mapping and Diagramming course is quite nice, if I do say so myself. Karen Moyer even complemented my colors! (Mind you, this was made for print, so the screen colors aren’t right at all).  The viz shows one week of how, where, and when I listen to music.

March 3rd, 2008
Posted by Paul in Visualizations, Communication Design, CMU | No Comments »  

Visualizing Sound and Sonifying Image

I’ve been meaning to post a couple of small projects I did for Golan Levin’s Audio-Visual Systems course. And hey! I’m finally getting around to it.

In this first assignment, we were asked to create a visualization of a short electronic piece by Scott Gibbons. I tried quite a few different things (none of which worked out) before settling on this format for my image. In this image, the skyline you see is actually a very accurate representation of the piece’s spectral make-up. The lines below the photograph represent my reaction to the timbre (in white) and panning (in blue).

Here’s the original spectrum:

And here’s my image:

For another assignment, we were asked to compose something interpreting a fragment of the visual score to Four Seasons by Robert Moran (1963).

To interpret the score, I decided to apply rules to the image, and then produce music that followed those rules. Broadly, I interpreted left to right as time, and top to bottom as panning from left (top) to right (bottom). I then set rules for each type of shape and visual aspect. Circles are percussion, lines show evolution (of rhythm or tones), solid shapes are full sounds, outlines are more hollow sounds. Triangles were violins and pads, rectangles represented bass and lead sounds, etc. Finally, I took my rules and scripted out what each shape in the score should sound like before sitting down and synthesizing/sampling my sounds and composing them to fit the score. I worked on this piece for days, and was really disappointed when we didn’t listen to it in class. So if you listen to it here, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Though it’s not the style of music that I usually make, it was a rewarding experience for me to work on something so ‘composed.’

Here is the score:

and here is my composition: Rhythm is Destroyed

February 13th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Visualizations, CMU, Music and Movies | No Comments »