synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

It took a little longer, but finally here’s the sourcecode for Angelica.

Download AudioVis.tar.gz (302,4 KB)

If you want to include lyrics, the file must contain data in this format:

   1  [00:31.09] Finally the hills are without eyes
   2  [00:34.50] They are tired of painting a dead man's face red
   3  [00:40.01] With their own blood
   4  [00:44.31] They used to love having so much to lose
   5  [00:49.92] Blink your eyes just once and see everything in ruins 

To encode the images into video I used mencoder with these parameters:

   1  /usr/bin/mencoder "mf://out/*.png" -mf fps=25 -audiofile data/audio.mp3 \
   2  -o video.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc \
   3  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=16000:mbd=2:trell=yes:v4mv=yes

Feel free to use, change and criticize the code. It’s far from being perfect. ;-)

I’m looking forward to your comments.

This is the first processing sketch using audio visualization I built. It was created as a final project for a Processing course at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda. As one might guess, it was inspired by the amazing works of flight404. All frames have been rendered into pngs and encoded to video, using mencoder, later. Music is Lamb – Angelica. Made with Processing.

I’ll upload the sources later and maybe write a short tutorial about it …

This one started as an homework for university but I really started to like it. The original task was to built a fuzzy controller using Matlab in groups of 2 or 3 students. I joined Benjamin and another fellow student to create a simple fuzzy controller for flying a plane in a given height above the ground. To make things a little more complex we also considered head wind. As all of us three didn’t like the quite abstract results of our controller in Matlab, we decided to implement a small simulation in processing. We used Edward Saznov’s open source fuzzy inference engine for Java and integrated it into processing. Surprisingly everything worked quite well from the beginning. Although we had some small issues we were able to build a nice looking and functional simulation using the controller we designed. The resulting applet runs perfectly in the browser and as an application. (I love processing’s export-feature.) Check out the sketch by clicking on the picture below.

Here are the controls you might need :-)

We decided to release the source code of this. It still could need some refactoring, but it’s working and deadline was today, so feel free to experiment with it (or even improve it) and sent us some comments!

As my current term at university is crammed with projects, presentations and term papers, it is quite hard to remember every deadline. I was constantly worrying about them and pretty badly needed a way to manage all my tasks. As I mentioned Getthing Things Done on this blog some time ago but hadn’t tried it yet, I decided to give it a chance. I didn’t buy the book by David Allen, but searched for a simple tool to implement GTD in my everyday life. (Rails applications preferred, of course) What I found was Tracks – Doing Things Properly an open source rails app providing everything I needed. Its slick interface makes it easy to manage actions, projects and contexts. Additionally actions can be exported in RSS or iCal format, although I customized the RSS a little to reverse the order and display the due-date.

After using it for about one month now, I really recommend it! No more worrying about forgetting deadlines or entire tasks!

If you want to try Tracks without having to set it up on your own, just contact me and I’ll add an account for you.

I’m currently attending a course called “Animation programming with Processing”. It’s a blended-learning course lectured at my university. I heard about processing before but never looked at it closely. Processing is a simple programming language build on top of Java and comes with its own, simple IDE. It includes some basic functionality and can be extended with a variety of libraries (Audio, Video, 3D, Network, ...).

It’s amazing how easy it is to write stunning animations with very little lines of code. Combined with a simple webcam and a projector you’ll get cool interactive installations:

Presence

I, Ball

Check out the exhibition at processing.org too!

Maybe I’ll upload some of my own sketches during the next weeks.