They’re great when listening to popular Dutch electro music!

You can download all 10 here: http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/downloads/MMinimalist_visualizers.zip

To install (Mac OS X):

1) unzip the file and put them in your /Library/Compositions folder.

2) Open iTunes (quit and restart if it was open)

3) Select a visualizer from View -> Visualizers

Start the visualizer!

Please let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

Sound Space Interaction 2009

MAX/MSP is a great application to build an interactive sound environment. When we realised how we could connect to external inputs to MAX MSP from a Wii-mote, we got quite excited about building an interactive game using just sound in a space.

Our plan was to build a ‘lightsaber’ purely in sound. We researched how the sound designer Ben Burtt originally build the saber sounds for the hit film series ‘Star Wars’. The lightsaber is a sword with a column of brightly coloured energy in the place of a metal blade. We learned that the sound for the device, created in the 1970s, was made with totally analogue technology from source sounds such as the static of an un-tuned television and replayed though a speaker, then re-recorded live with feedback from microphone waved around in from of the speaker.

The available data provided by the Wii-mote produces values for the yaw, pitch, roll, acceleration and it has an extra infra-red camera. This meant we could not detect values for if the Wii-mote was swung around 360 degrees, only 270. In trying to cobat this limitation we tried using the built in infra-red detection, which proved much more complicated and was using up too much time whilst not really enhancing of the experience, and so decided to create the game limited to the 270 degree angle.

Using Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.wiiremote object, we took in the values from the Wii remote and mapped the panning and saber sound to a quadraphonic audio set up though a MUTO device. (Careful here as it seems some of the drivers can cause problems, both on Mac OS and windows systems- personally I went though no less than 12 kernel panics after installing the MOTU drivers, in part I think because of the previously installed soundflower software from Cycling 74).

Our original plan was to use 2 of the sabers in 2 rooms so you could fight a ‘fight with the invisible enemy’, however we couldn’t agree a good way on how the fight could be won or lost in this scenario and so came up with an alternative and more exciting proposition relating to when the Jedi Knights are in training. In the story, the ‘younglings’ (children born with strong sensitivity to the Force) are trained to use their light-sabers blindfolded, so they should use ‘the force’ to engage with small laser-firing drones sending out small ‘lightly painful’ laser beam to the subject which was either absorbed or reflected by the light saber.

This presented an interesting proposition to build a sound-based laser battle ground, with lasers flying in from any direction and be deflected by the soundsaber we’d built. To do this we used a quadraphonic 2D speaker set up and placed sounds between them .We used the Freeverb~ object to position the saber sound and the lasers.

The objective was to build a 1 or 2 player game in a single or pair of rooms, which meant there needed to be a competitive element in the game. This challenge resulted in a the idea of an audio representation of a haze, where the player would  have increasing difficulty in locating where the laser sounds were originating from. In a single room set-up this means for every miss there would be an increase in a futuristic noise sound, in keeping with the laser and saber sounds. In a dual room set-up every hit would increase the noise sound to the other room, making it more difficult for your opponent to detect the incoming laser sounds.

The resulting project works very well in a single room and with further development could be refined much more to give an engaging sonic battle experience. Next steps would include attempting to build the project in a 3D sound environment and further define the sound design to compensate to different sizes of playing fields and work on other solutions for turning 360 degress in the room.

If you would like to set up yourself or play with the patches, you can download the source here.

Enjoy!

Seascape features a series of gradually unfolding digital seascapes created using imagery captured in real time by webcams installed at five key vantage points along the south coast between Margate and Portsmouth. The cameras are positioned at various seafront locations in Margate, Folkstone, Bexhill, Pagham, and Stokes Bay.

Stokes bay 29/03/09 13:27

Pagham 29/03/09 13:26

Bexhill-on-sea 29/03/09 13:25

Folkstone 29/03/09 13:26

Margate 29/03/09 13:26

Susan Collins’ Seascape, from East to West.

Each reveal in real-time an image being constructed live from the webcams installed at the five locations across the South East coast. Continually collecting this data – from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands – these images are constantly generated and renewed pixel by pixel in front of the viewer.

To coincide with the exhibition, a publication on the Seascape project will be produced by Film and Video Umbrella. The book will feature newly commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt and Nicholas Alfrey and include an extensive colour plate section of archive seascape images. To order a copy email books@fvu.co.uk

Seascape is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion and is supported by Arts Council England and the Art and Humanities Research Council. The project would not have been possible without a large number or organisations and individuals:

Leas Cliff Hall (Folkestone), Pebble Beach Café (Stokes Bay), Slade Centre for Electronic Media, Slade Digital Print Studio, Information Systems (University College London), OK-RM (Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath) with Electronest (Jerome Rigaud & Pierre Schmidt), Nicholas Alfrey, Alex Baker, Adrian Barker, Martin John Callanan, Ian Cartwright, Sean Cubitt, Michael Duffy, Luci and Simon Eyers, Tim Head, Matthew Jarvis, James Keith, Stephen Levine, Pat Seggery, Simon Schofield, Fiona Sherriff, Graham and Antje Southern, Jon Thomson, Mike and Jane Windsor.

YouTube – Extreme Sheep LED Art.

Go on! Enter the Twitterverse!

Try it!

http://www.moodymap.net

 :)

Source code available on request.

This is a nice article explaining why this might be so:

Is Google Making Us Stupid? – The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

I think this can be related to the Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome, I’m not sure though.. my mind is now focusing on something else.. I’ll update this entry when I’ve written more about it

Take a look

Latest conclusions in a summery by me of a chapter in Jonathan Haidt’s book, the Happiness Hypothesis (2006).

Passionate love is a drug.
It’s symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy) [according to Julien, 1998.] And [Bartels and Zeki, 2000 with Fisher, 2004 describe how] parts of the brain are altered, with passionate love, including those parts which are involved with the release of dopamine. This is like drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels. Therefore love is like a drug, and if you take it once a month you do not become addicted, whereas if you take it everyday, you will. However the brain reacts to a chronic surplus of dopamine and develops neurochemical reactions that oppose it and restores its own equilibrium. Like drugs, when withdrawn the brain becomes unbalanced in the opposite direction; pain, lethargy and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.

Does this mean nobody can stay in love forever? Well, there is the other type of love, companionate love. Passionate love doesn’t turn into companionate love- they are 2 different processes and have different time courses. There are 2 danger points in passionate love, one when you can’t think straight and it burns at it’s maximum temperature- this is when people can get married during the first few weeks or months of madness. The other point is when the brain has rebalanced from this crazy obsessional high. This usually happens in one of the lovers, the fire has calmed and they can now see all the faults in their partners they couldn’t before. The other lover becomes confused. One of the lovers may decide the game is up, and they made decide to break up. This could be a mistake however as they would never have given companionate love a chance to grow. True love, the love that is behind strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to eachother [These are 3 components of Sternberg's (1986) triangular theory of love]. Two graphs here (quick drawn up in MacDraft) describe the differences in the two types of love. In the 1st graph we can see that companionate love looks weak. Taken over a longer period of time however, it’s the compasionate love that looks like a flash in the pan, trivial affair, and companionate love that lasts a lifetime.

I decided to conduct some research.

My paper is here: http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/presentations/Creative Research (Matthew & Mario).pdf

Here are the results: