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

Click the flash movie below, and try keys:

spacebar to add or make another,

0 to toggle on/off the spiwrongraphs, SHIFT+0 to choose spiwrongraphs,

1 to toggle on/off  the random L-System, SHIFT+1 to choose the L-Systems, Q/A/M/N/O/P/I/U etc. arrow keys, SHIFT arrow keys.

2 makes a new buffer, use with 3 on to play,

3 turns off and on the animation – leaves trails when off,

4, 5, are scrolling backgrounds

6 is a dot thing – space bar will create more (when it’s chosen – SHIFT  6). play with 2 and 3 when this is chosen.

Download flash source code from public repository at http://publicsvn.stephendwolff.com/sdw_public.

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

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.

http://www.melodyhound.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 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
(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.

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.