Out of an explosion of terrifying industrial noise, through a murky haze of retro-tinged monochromatic texture, Sigur Rós emerge in an enigmatic teaser for a new project dubbed INNI.
In case that arresting grind of gears and aggressive cacophony don’t square you away, you’re treated to film of the band playing and more-characteristic, lullaby-like tunes.
It remains extraordinary to me what a phenomenon Sigur Rós and, via bandmates, Jónsi have become. These Icelandic maestros have made all manner of sonic experimentation wildly popular, bringing their moody, sometimes-cinematic, meandering compositional genius around the planet.
Some music I like, personally, is very unpopular. Some makes Stereogum – like Sigur Rós. And in this case, I’m excited for a new release. (Most readers are betting, and I agree, on a live concert video release. If it all looks like this, that’ll be just fine.) Strip away the visibility, the artiness of a particular band, and to me Sigur Rós’ members have represented some vitally important musical imagination in recent years. You?
Side note – thanks for using Topspin, and making things embeddable and not exclusive. Embed on.
Today, we note the availability on Android of Control, a WebKit-based touch interface also on iOS.
For visualists and interactive designers, it’s worth paying attention to one feature in particular: dynamic interface creation. Perhaps biased by the musicians who have tended to embrace them, touch interfaces have tended to rely on the static layouts favored by physical knobs and faders. That’s arguably the worst of both worlds: you lose the tactile feedback of physical controls, but you don’t add any of the flexibility of a display.
Control is an open-source application rendered in HTML5, powered by JavaScript and JSON, so it’s capable of anything you can imagine. But Charlie Roberts has already demonstrated how a dynamic interface could work. Using OSC, you can make control layouts on the fly. That could lead to more sophisticated software integration for visual and musical performance, new chances for collaboration and live rigs, and the ability to make an interface on someone’s device in an interactive situation.
We saw the last of these scenarios in the case of the iOS app mrmr, developed by Eric Redlinger. As proof of concept, I and others put together a gallery show using mrmr, at which interactive pieces were able to build interfaces on-the-fly on user’s iPhones and iPads. With Control, those horizons expand, no longer constrained to individual proprietary UI widgets on one platform (like iOS), but cross-platform, Web-based, and dynamic.
But dynamic layouts could go in many, many directions. Since this is especially relevant to visual performance, perhaps in modes of interaction not really possible in music, I’d love to hear what readers imagine. And do try Charlie’s app, whether on iOS, Android, or both: Control
– and if you’re really ambitious, have a look at the source!
Following yesterday’s interview with Kyle McDonald on FaceOSC, his custom webcam + tracking application that can make music with your face, here’s another face-controlled music demo. This one uses Ableton Live for jamming. I should add, since I somewhat obscured the fact, that this isn’t Kinect: it works entirely with a built-in webcam, which means it’s completely free to try and you don’t have to tote any extra hardware, so long as you have a laptop with a built-in cam. More on this technology as we watch it evolve…
Two spacey ways of finding media: music collections, heirarchy, and images of planets in Planetary for iPad, top. Sound and loop collections, “magnetic” relations, algorithmic categorization, and rapid torchlight auditioning in Soundtorch 2.0 for Windows, bottom.
If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing media as virtual planets and stars. One works on albums and tracks on the iPad; the other uses computer-aided analysis of loops and samples (not just music) on Windows. One will make your eyeballs pop; one might help you manage gigs of samples for a game design project.
Built in the open-source framework Cinder by an all-star team of media artist-designers (Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin), Planetary should satisfy space nuts and eye candy lovers. The metaphor is pretty direct: artists are stars, albums are planets around the artists, tracks are moons around the planets, and you can filter “constellations” by letter. That means the actual structure is heavily hierarchical, actually, in the tradition of iTunes (and, before it, its predecessor SoundJam). I’m not sure what happens with, say, compilations. But let’s face it: the real draw is that it’s incredibly beautiful to look at. I’d be just as entertained looking at a visualization of my system folder if it looked this pretty.
For now, Planetary is some fascinating eye candy with at least basic playback capabilities, iPad-only. That brings some good news – Airplay wireless works, and since it makes use of standard media code, even features like Last.fm scrobbles function. It also brings some bad — while Apple added support for libraries to third-party apps, Home Sharing isn’t included, so you’re limited to what’s on your iPad. Playlists aren’t supported, either. But hook this up to a projector or large screen TV with some of your favorite music, and I don’t think you’ll be complaining. And as a free tool, it’s incredible.
Less pretty, but with greater facilities on the utility side, is the Windows-only Soundtorch. (Thanks to Kristian Gohlke for the tip!) Visually, it offers a similar metaphor: media assets live on a continuous plane. Functionally, though, it’s more algorithmic than hierarchic, using something called the Computer Aided Sound Exploration engine (C.A.S.E.). The set of algorithms, which the creators say were based on evaluation of human listening, performs a sophisticated set of extractions of some 600 features from each sound file.
Rather than limit itself to albums and tracks, C.A.S.E. is tuned for audio files and loops. It’s fast enough that it can plow quickly through gigs of material. So, if you’re on Windows and have amassed an enormous collection of loops, samples, field recordings, sound effects, and the like, Soundtorch will use C.A.S.E. to first map all those relationship, then visualize them. You can use the mouse to produce new collections of assets, map relationships visually, export those relationship to XML, copy sounds to the clipboard, export to WAV, or open them in Windows Explorer. That is, all that eye candy is a genuine interface, not a barrier between you and what you might do (as so often happens with these sorts of experimental interfaces).
In fact, you might argue that, despite outward appearances, Soundtorch is entirely different from Planetary, but they share one common conceptual assumption. Related media “orbit” or attract to common materials. The difference is that Soundtorch is relational. In Soundtorch, if you “magnetize” a file, it – and any similar files – become attracted to attractors called “magnets.”
As is appropriate searching for media, the “torchlight” metaphor shines a light through files. Everything under the light plays back simultaneously, so you don’t have to audition sounds one at a time. (That sounds slightly terrifying to me, but I have to spend more time with it in an actual library.)
The creators describe the magic thusly:
Have you ever listened to a sound and felt that there was a similar one somewhere on your hard disk? And the sound you can’t find would just work so much better right now? Well, Soundtorch also remembers all sounds that you ever listened to. Just select any sound on Soundtorch, and let the system suggest the most similar ones from your whole collection.
In other words, SoundTorch is as much about what you can’t see as what you can – the intelligence to determine similarity behind the scenes. Check out the tech talk in the video above for more information on how “aurally and visually-enhanced audio search” could also apply this technology. More research at: http://www.accessive-tools.com/
Finally, if you want to hear the “Optimist” track by Zoe Keating without that voiceover and just enjoy Planetary’s gorgeous visuals, here you go:
From innovation in the visual interface to the intelligence underneath that changes how the computer interprets relationships between files, finally, there’s hope. Music and sound might not forever be trapped in views borrowed from spreadsheets, tables modeled on the needs of accountants 30 years ago.
For people coding for visuals, Processing just keeps getting better. And for people who aren’t … well, you might just want to give it a second look, as a growing global army of people who never fancied themselves coders suddenly start typing up new creations. A new release makes mobile development easier and corrects lots of bugs. But specifically of interest to readers here, powerful libraries for 3D help make Processing an intensive tool for creating visuals. With the aid of running of your GPU, they can also deliver eye-popping real-time performance not normally associated with Java.
Processing 1.5
In a surprise release, much of what’s coming in Processing 2.0 this summer is now available in a stable, general release of Processing 1.5. It lacks the new built-in renderer – OPENGL2 – but does incorporate new features for developing for Android and, via the third-party library GLGraphics, you get all sorts of new OpenGL goodies. (Note: Processing 1.5 = 0196. The previous pre-release version, 0195, is worth downloading if you want to play with the new OPENGL2 renderer and its examples. Both are on the download page, and they can be installed side-by-side.)
Most importantly, for anyone publishing to the Web, you need to download this version now and re-export sketches. Applets were seeming to run very slow in Chrome and Firefox 4. (While I vastly prefer the Java version for things like performance tools or installations, I also appreciate the Processing.js JavaScript fork for Web delivery – but this fix does make applets work pretty well.)
New to Processing 1.5:
Tons of editor fixes in the PDE development environment
An essential bug fix that corrects slow performance when exporting for the Web.
Android development support – in preview builds, but now in a stable build. (I think this is still considered a pre-release feature, but it means you can run the stable build to try it out.) Now go make stuff for phones and tablets easily.
Processing 1.5 is a good start, but for me, the live visual workflow isn’t complete without two additional libraries, toxiclibs and GLGraphics. A new GLGraphics update improves integration with both toxiclibs and the new Processing release.
toxiclibs
toxiclibs represents over 270 classes in 7 libraries, some 25,000 lines of code, written by digital artist Karsten “toxi” Schmidt. There’s gobs of stuff in there. The most useful is a basic set of classes for things like geometries, meshes, and 3D vectors which you’d otherwise have to build from scratch, and which are generally built in fairly standard ways. With elegant math, Verlet physics, and color libraries, and wonderfully-usable API design, Karsten gives you all the essentials in a way that will inspire you to use them and make something truly original. (A full tour is probably a good subject for another post. Just ignore the toxi.audio packages; with the libpd crew, I’m working on something with Pd I think you’ll find more useful and stable.)
I had a discussion with one colleague who felt that, indeed, toxi’s libraries are so powerful that people are simply using it as a crutch. That may be true to an extent: people should prominently credit toxi’s work, and to do otherwise is plagiarism. But with proper credit, I feel that standing on the shoulders of someone else’s work can be a good thing. Digging through toxi’s libraries is like going to school for the sorts of math and geometry that you need to learn to understand 3D generation. For many of these classes, involving essential mathematics operations and 3D modeling, I’d have no idea where to start, would spend weeks or months writing something inefficient, and would come out with something that reinvented the wheel. A lot of the techniques themselves in those 27,000 lines of code weren’t developed by Karsten, either: it’s more like seeing the wisdom of a master teacher, assembled from a wide variety of sources and passed on.
In fact, this is a rant that I should probably invoke elsewhere, but to me received knowledge is the essence of any craft. Composers don’t invent new rules of harmony (well, at least, not tonal harmony). Engineers don’t work out the laws of physics from scratch each time they build something.
And most importantly, because all of this exists in code, you can read and modify anything you find. It’s a black box if you want it to be, but I very often dig directly into the code to understand how things work.
There’s a bunch of documentation and a showcase for great work: http://toxiclibs.org/
GLGraphics
All of this, though, brings me to GLGraphics. As I’ve been saying for – gee, years now – GLGraphics is the future of Processing. Now, that’s come to pass: gifted developer Andres Colubri authored the new OPENGL2 renderer that is similarly based on native OpenGL calls, and now runs the Processing Android port and upcoming Processing 2.0.
GLGraphics is separate from OPENGL2, but it’s your best bet for work on the stable Processing 1.5 build. Version 0.95 adds compatibility for that latest release, and adds two essential other features:
An example of how to integrate with toxiclibs
GLSL shader support, which can in turn be used for complex mesh generation.
And there should be still more coolness to talk about soon, at least for Mac users, with the availability of Syphon for Processing. Stay tuned on that.
I think I have to hide away in a hole and do nothing but code this weekend. Anyone want to hop on IRC or PiratePad and pass code snippets back and forth?
Photography can transform scale, whether in time, space, or a combination of the two. scntfc, the hyper-talented audiovisual artist, sends some eye-explodingly good work our way, prompted by yesterday’s coverage of a two-minute condensation of a trip from San Francisco to Paris.
Before returning to the theme of timelapse time travel and aerospace, let’s look first at what happens when you collapse scale in the spatial dimension via macro photography. Undone is a series of close-up shots, a balletic glimpse of the world viewed closer through a lens. Artist Andy Rohrmann aka scntfc shares it with us.
At top:
An excerpt from the forthcoming film series “Undone”.
Video: scntfc
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli) – Pale Fire 5
Canon 5d mkii, 100mm macro, 65mm macro
On the theme of airplane-window timelapse, “Minneapolis to Seattle” from three years ago pieces the airborne-viewed landscape into a patchwork collage. As the creator describes it:
a different take on time lapse photography and photo collage. all photos are taken on a flight from minneapolis to sea-tac, i had completed the basic layout and timelapse a few years ago, and finally polished it up with music, time shifting, and misc effects to give it more character. time shifting is still pretty rough and will be revised, time permitting…maybe in another four years. i have several more in this style, just have to find the time to update those as well.
Here’s another macro video for good measure:
First trailer for the upcoming film series “Undone”.
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli)
Where can I find a list of public hospitals along with their location data? I have the school performance statistics worldwide, so how do I share it with the rest of the world? These questions are being posed right now. So, gone are the days visualization addicts (like me...) had to be content with datasets that dealt with the weather, the stock market, and uhm... the weather.
A lot has been happening in the "data" arena, lately. Almost too much to cover in a series of individual posts. So here is a short update of some of the most recent and most important developments (if I missed some, please add in the comments section!).
Public Data [publicdata.eu] has recently opened its virtual doors, as it attempts to rival to the US data.gov initiative in collecting all of Europe's Open Data (and not just governmental data).
Get The Data [getthedata.org] is a more qualitative approach, as it aims to solve the many questions surrounding the aspects of finding and dealing with data. The forum covers topics like "finding" the right data, recommends tools to explore the data, or even provides help in how to clean or reformat data to make it readable for the most relevant visualization or analysis tools.
Data Market [datamarket.com] has launched a few weeks ago. Data Market aims to connect data providers with data seekers: they have integrated more than 40 data providers, some of them really large, like the UN, World Bank and Eurostat, all in a single place. It is an ambitious undertaking: their goal is to be - within a few years - to statistics what Google is to web content. If the data exists out there, a person should become confident that it turns up in a search on DataMarket.com, regardless if it comes from a free and open data source, or a premium data provider.
If historical data repositories is not your thing, you might find "real-time" data more interesting: the Sunlight Labs has just released the Real Time Congress API View History. Who knew the word "Congress" can be mixed with such tech jargon and still be believable? I was guessing that the API gives access to speeches as-they-are-spoken, or provides votes statistics at the-instant-the-congressmen-press-their-little-vote-button, but I can be wrong. Currently, the API consists of 7 collections: bills, votes, amendments, videos, floor updates, committee hearings, and documents.
Lastly, Google Public Data Explorer [google.com] is now open for anyone's data. That means that Google has opened up their data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), while it also provides an interface for anyone to upload their own datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer.
The “aura” application shown in the video above demonstrates rich graphics and physics engine similar to TAT’s “scrapbook” demo, but was built entirely with web technologies like HTML5 and CSS. Built in a week, “aura” demonstrates how web developers can leverage the professional grade performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook platform just like Adobe AIR and native application developers.
This is a perfect example of why developers packed the BlackBerry Developer Day WebWorks bootcamp sessions yesterday. Click the link below to download the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and start building your own BlackBerry PlayBook Application!
Attention, 3D fans: OpenGL in the browser has gradually gotten real. WebGL is a browser-friendly API for OpenGL graphics, and it’s pretty darned close to OpenGL ES 2.0, which in turn will be familiar to anyone doing modern mobile 3D development. WebGL isn’t part of HTML5, but HTML5 makes it possible: the Canvas element is what allows WebGL to work its magic. And WebGL goes nicely with technologies that are part of HTML5 or modern browser experiments, including the web audio API and browser video support. (The superb 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web has a 3D in the browser section, well worth reading.) And you can use JavaScript (among other modern languages) to code 3D creations.
If you love the idea of sharing 3D as easily as a webpage, this is big news. It’s a huge step forward from the clunky, unpredictable, confusing use of Java for browser OpenGL, and unlike that solution, it’s part of the page on which it’s delivered, not part of a plug-in or launched app.
In recent days, we’ve seen the first stable browser with WebGL enabled by default, Google Chrome. Right now, Chrome or Firefox 4 beta are likely the easiest and most stable way to test WebGL graphics. I’ve been testing Firefox 4 beta on Linux and more recently the stable Chrome on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it’s pretty fantastic.
Read Google’s announcement from Thursday, along with the other enhancements to Chrome: A dash of speed, 3D and apps
Perhaps more exciting than the Chrome update is the superb Chrome Experiments, which recently added 3D goodness, from creative tools to eye candy to useful tools like an exploration of human anatomy: WebGL Experiments
Grabbing the latest Chrome or installing Firefox beta will let you see them, but here are a couple of picks are a cool place to start, and have videos attached if you aren’t near a bleeding-edge browser:
I’m pretty impressed with performance of experiments like the aquarium. I’m on a fairly low-end, last generation laptop with an NVIDIA 9500M, and they run easily.
WebGL is still early in development – Chrome is the first and only stable browser with support – but we’re getting to the phase when you could actually distribute stuff with it, and it could hit prime time very soon.
Which browsers support WebGL?
Chrome’s release is a very big deal. As I write this, WebGL is available in:
Chrome stable, from now on
Firefox 4.0b8 and later, meaning once Firefox 4 stable is shipped, stable Firefox, too
Opera plans support, but no public build is available yet.
Microsoft appears not to be planning support for IE9, meaning it’s most likely to be odd man out … again. But you can get support for WebGL inside IE using the free Chrome Frame plug-in.
Really, if you want to try this out, installing Chrome is a good idea. It’s also no accident that Google’s Chrome Web App store means people with interesting creations have an avenue for distribution, which should soon also be true with an open Mozilla-based store for Firefox et al.
Yes! Processing.js is actually a pretty decent way to fiddle around with it. The caveat is that WebGL support in Processing.js is a work in progress; if you want to get deeper, you’ll probably want to get into direct JavaScript control of WebGL. But that hasn’t stopped people from making some interesting hacks and work, and it’s a great place to start. Some demos –
A Processing.js Web IDE that uses WebGL:
– and a stunning music visualizer we’ve seen here before:
What about Google’s O3D?
O3D is some impressive technology and for many of us was the first truly compelling vision of 3D in a browser. The downside – it’s currently a plug-in. But Google does sometimes live up to their “open Web” hype. They’ve said they’re focused on improving WebGL, and that they’ll take the ideas from O3D (like its scene graph) and port to JavaScript and WebGL. There’s even an early version of the work.
It’s worth reading the (official Google) Chromium blog on the matter, partly to see how they’ve come around on JavaScript performance.
This is all compelling stuff, so let’s all abandon everything we’re doing and switch to WebGL — right? Well, not necessarily:
It’s not done yet. WebGL the spec appears pretty stable, but browser support is still forthcoming. When we (presumably) see stable Safari and Firefox builds in the near term, though, I think the whole thing will get a lot bigger.
Universal browser support is a long ways off. Microsoft’s lack of support in IE could be a side effect of the lack of universal OpenGL drivers on the Windows platform. Whatever the reason, count out IE. And likewise, count out anyone with a capable GPU card. Even compared to the mess of video support, 3D is likely to be a “nice-to-have” feature on the Web, not the universal feature the traditional 2D page is.
Mobile WebGL isn’t even on the table yet. So, JavaScript – yep, it’s faster on desktop computers. But mobile implementations are still evolving, mobile browsers still lag their desktop counterparts (even sometimes when they’re both based on the same Web engine, like WebKit), and performance on much less-capable mobile chips isn’t there just yet. That said, see the last bullet in this list…
Live visuals, art will still often need “native” tools. Want to output to a second monitor, or monitors, plural? Doing something crazy like routing textures between apps? Live visualists are pushing the kinds of features that won’t be accessible immediately on the browser.
Full-blown OpenGL isn’t available. OpenGL ES 2 is pretty great, but if you need the full OpenGL API, this isn’t designed to be that. And…
Performance is still better with C/C++. Don’t get me wrong – performance with JavaScript is stunningly good, good enough that those Google engineers changed their assessment. But it seems to me this depends on your goals. If you’re really concerned with squeezing every last ounce of performance out of your graphics, necessary if your work is about visuals with greater complexity, this still really isn’t for you.
This isn’t an either/or choice – OpenGL wins! Here’s the major point for me. You don’t have to choose WebGL as an exclusive solution, partly because you don’t have to choose WebGL. Invest your time in OpenGL, and learn the basic nuances when comparing, say, OpenGL 3.2 on the desktop to OpenGL ES 2 on Android and iOS to WebGL in the browser, and you can be everywhere with relatively minor adjustments.
What’s surprising to me just writing that list is, while it appears long, the advantages of WebGL are still clear, and it makes sense that some of these differences will disappear. I imagine we will still need desktop software. Google, while characterized as some sort of browser-only religion, themselves continue adding native support in their Android platform, so presumably they understand game developers and other parties want that native OpenGL access. The question may not be whether WebGL “replaces” those tools, but whether people find smarter workflows and integrated higher-level APIs to work across the platforms.
Let’s sum it up this way: if you love 3D, and if you’re an OpenGL nerd, you’re in very happy times, indeed.
And regardless, you get to watch a cool jellyfish in Chrome any time you need to unwind.
Soon after research highlighting that Android has surpassed Nokia to become the world’s most popular smartphone OS was published, a new report from Strategy Analytics suggests that Google’s mobile OS has now captured a record 22% of the tablet market.
According to figures stated in the report, global tablet shipments reached 9.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010 with Apple continuing to dominate the tablet market with a 75% global share. Although impressive, Apple’s share slipped 20% from 95% in the third quarter, thanks largely to the apparent success of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab which sold over one million units in two months after it launched.
Despite warnings from Google that its Android operating system at the time wasn’t specifically tailored for large-screen tablet devices, manufacturers rushed their Android tablets to market in the fourth quarter, offering low cost devices aimed at capturing early-adopters and those without the budget for an Apple device.
Strategy Analytics expects Android to increase share in the first half of 2011, we tend to agree with them. At the recent CES event, a number of high-powered Android tablet devices were announced, most running Google’s new Android Honeycomb operating system, software that Google hopes will tempt many users away from Apple’s iOS-toting iPad.
Apple is expected to announce its next-generation iPad within the next couple of months, rumours suggesting it will become available in early Summer. We imagine Apple will record phenomenal sales of its new tablet but as the tablet market continues to expand, Android tablets will continue to provide significant competition for consumer hearts and wallets.Image Credit
