Expo Brighton and an old video

July 5th, 2008

Ah, the sights, the sounds of Brighton… i’d forgotten how vibrant a Friday night can be (viewed from the inside of a cab from the train to Sarah Angliss’s house…) Living in Dorset has definitely slowed me down!

I’m here to do a (brief) gig with Sarah for the Expo involving some robotic bells, a hammered dulcimer player and my cello. Listening to the bells this morning (while waiting to go to the venue) is slowing inducing madness as they’ve been electronically treated and aren’t stopping…

Anyhow, last night my attention was drawn to a video taken by some folk from the New Scientist at our gig (!) in the NPL reverberation chamber last in 2006. Here’s the link – some of the comments are priceless:

Theremin and cello video taken by New Scientist

Dogs’ Ears

May 23rd, 2008

What fun was had making this one! Old friend Julie Freeman’s latest project “Dog’s Ears” is due to launch today, and i gave a helping hand making a Flash shell for the video chat room part of the project.

The Dogs’ Ears website gives visitors the opportunity to enter a one-to-one chatroom with one of the fine dogs that Julie has sourced. It’s low-cost subscription based for the full experience, or alternatively a brief preview of the video can be seen for free.

dorset digital

March 21st, 2008

I moved to Dorset in October 2007, and my son Douglas arrived in November. Things have been a little busy since then… but through meeting various folk along the way, it seemed a good idea to arrange some sort of gathering of local people involved in making web sites and the like. Thus dorsetdigital.co.uk was born… 

There’s a little applet which plays some digital myopic fun, created to make this months header graphic. The aim is to have a new header for each month, and given that it’s March 21st and the site has only just gone online, if nothing comes through I’ve something up my sleeves.  

vjsuals for bela

January 20th, 2008

I made a decision to put various bits of my art-y code online, and to see what happens. The first project up in my public code repository was written for some visuals i ‘played’ live for my friend the cellist Bela Emerson.

Read the rest of this entry »

Soundwear

June 21st, 2007

Finally something up at http://www.soundwear.co.uk. A project i’ve been working on a fair while with Simon Thorogood, and that will gradually get more developed over time (as is the way). The general idea is to use sound as part of the fashion design process, by asking visitors to make colour and shape choices while listening to selected pieces of music.

The initial version lets the user pick a range of colours, but isn’t yet saving to a database.

The NPL Reverberation Chamber

December 8th, 2006

Today, a small snatch of my ‘cello playing in the National Physical Laboratory reverberation chamber, made it to the radio waves of Radio 4’s Today programme!

Today Programme Gallery of the recording session

Sarah Angliss, Mike Blow, Colin Uttley and I are going back into the National Physical Laboratory today to video our playing, this video will be online sometime over the weekend. Please email [me at stephendwolff dot com] if you’d like to be sent a link to this, once we’ve posted it.

Musical Search Engine

October 8th, 2006

While browsing the other day, I came across this unusual search engine. I especially liked the search by tapping!

http://www.melodyhound.com/

The night before Senster

September 27th, 2006


To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com

Source code: Forest_Web Branch Interpolate Lsystem Rule RuleSet Tree Turtle

Built with Processing

So, click the applet (if you can see it!) and then try hitting 1, 2, 3, 4, b, <, >, UP, DOWN, LEFT or RIGHT, and anything else you can think of, you never know…

It’s the night before the show, and as usual (it seems with this show), it’s all still a bit of a blur, and anything could happen! It’s technically a very complicated show – switching between computers and bits of software every five minutes on all sorts of different cues. Max Patches being affected by sound input triggering stuff happening in Processing, with video coming in, powerpoint slides being played, quicktime movies accompanied by resampled ancient synths in Logic. Kind of what we (as Sarah said tonight) have been dreaming of doing for yonks, but now it’s actually happening, we’re realising quite how much work is involved. Brilliant fun nonetheless, and it can only get better!

Now for the Forest. A bit of history with this one. I have been bela visuals working for ages on some Flash L-Systems (Lindenmayer systems) as part of some visuals (visual jockey – not video) for my friend Bela. She’s a cellist, and so am i, and on a whim i ended up accompanying her on a German tour with some of my graphics.

With Senster, we were looking at possible programmatic Cherry Tree Web
(and ‘generative’) elements to include in the show, and my L-System work cropped up. But, these particular L-Systems are random, and not very plant like (the original point of the generative system, imitating plant growth). I struggled for a bit to make mine more tree like, then in a bit of a rush found some code on the internet from mr (or ms) blprnt.com. While beautiful and a nifty bit of code, it wasn’t quite in keeping with darker intentions for the show, so did a bit of hacking to reduce things to black and white, and make a whole forest out of it. For the Senster shows in May 2006 (in Brighton festival), everything seemed quite slow during parts of the growing process. This has been ironed out now, in September 2006, and i added some volume influence to branch thickness.

music from genetic algorithms

July 21st, 2006

i just found an example which goes from the other end – to make music with genetic algorithms (GAs)

http://www.blprnt.com/darwinstruments/

Synaesthesia tests

June 22nd, 2006

http://www.synesthete.org/ contains lots of interesting info about synaesthesia, including some tests to find out whether or not you have the condition , where some of your senses get mixed up (consistently).

I’ve long been fascinated with composers who apparently see (or saw) colours for musical chords – such as Messaien or Scriabin – and after completing my Evolutionary & Adaptive Systems MSc found that synaesthesia also offers cognitive science researchers a valuable difference from the norm with which to understand how our senses work.