{#image244}RtFFT by Gary P. Scavone is a fairly basic realtime spectrum analyzer. It can simultaneously display an arbitrary number of FFT signals, which correspond to the spectra of data input from one or more channels of your computer soundcard. The plot window can be zoomed to any arbitrary limits. Controls are provided for the FFT size, the window type, and window averaging.
{#image241}The Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. […] The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time....
In a discussion of “the most complex Max patch”, Barry Threw pointed to the patch used by TrioMetrik, the ensemble of the BEAM Foundation. There’s also a video with shots of musicians and patches.
Occam takes OSC messages and converts them to MIDI. It exports a MIDI source to CoreMIDI which can be used in any Mac OS X application that accepts MIDI. It broadcats the existence of this OSC-to-MIDI service using Rendezvous (Zero-Conf).
I got to learn about a number of interesting OSC-related stuff during the OSC developers’ meeting at NIME today: HID2OSC from the KeyWorx people OSCmap from Rémy Muller (IRCAM) where you can either manually build your OSC namespace with as a tree or let the OSC learn do the job for you. you can also save the namespaces for later reuse. Then you can link source and target adresses. It is available for both OSX and Windows....
{.imagelink}Choreographer Dawn Stoppiello and composer/media artist Mark Coniglio of Troika Ranch talked about their work. They are currently using EyesWeb for tracking, and Isadora for video and audio generation. {#image204}Marc Downie presented his work developing tools for working with visuals in a dance context. He has been working with realtime motion capture on stage (both Vicon and Motion Analysis). He will release his Fluid system under GPL in October 2006....
{.imagelink}Sonic Visualiser from Queen Mary’s is yet another software tool for visualizing audio content. However, there are some features that stand out: Cross-platform: available for OS X, Linux, Windows GPL’ed Native support for aiff, wav, mp3 and ogg (but what about AAC?) Annotations: Support for adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves. The annotations can be overlayed on top of waveforms and spectrograms Time-stretch Vamp Plugins is at the core of the Sonic Visualiser, and it seems like they want this to become a standard for non-realtime audio plugins....
{.imagelink}int.lib is a set of abstractions/javascripts for Cycling 74’s Max MSP software that facilitates the control of multiple parameters by navigating a two dimensional visual environment. It implements a gravitational system, allowing the user to represent presets with variable sized balls. As the user moves around the space, the size of the balls and their proximity to the mouse cursor affects the weight of each preset in the interpolated output....
Nils showed me this nice picture site called DesignKlicks from Spiegel Online. It is this 3d-picture space where you can move around and look at similar pictures. Unfortunately it is based on keyword descriptions and not on picture content. I really look forward to the day we get picture (and also music and video) browsers like this working on media content itself.
Found an interesting thread on the Max list entitled Working with Max is not easy. But what is easy. Before we learn something we find it difficult. When we know it we find it easy. I guess a problem with Max, if it can be called a problem, is that its low entry-level (at least compared to many other programming languages) is that the user might be misleaded into thinking that this is something that can be mastered in two weeks....