Computational Arts by Matthew Brown

Done with Quartz Composer with the intention of replicating the appearance of a Fractal Flame rendered through Scott Draves’ Flam3, except live rendered based on audio input.

This isn’t a fractal, but I think it does re-create the appearance quite well.

The video quality isn’t even close to the live render quality, but it gives you a good idea of it.

The screen recording here has taken the mic input and used it for the animation. The song used in this recording is “August (Reggae Rework)” by el-B from http://ccmixter.org/files/elB/16075 under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 License.

You can download the Quartz file here, note though that while this will open in Tiger, it will not render correctly, OS X 10.5 Leopard is required for it to run correctly.

It should also be noted that the video above was rendered on a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz with 2gb of RAM and an 8600m GT and it averages 5 frames per second, so to really experience the full potential of this, it needs to run on a Mac with a fairly powerful video card like a Mac Pro, the iMac’s and new Macbook Pro’s should also render it quite nicely.

The reason it is so intensive is because there are a number of iterator and replicate in space patches along with LFO’s and interpolator’s that are affected by both the audio volume peak and the audio spectrum, so depending on the volume and the type of music, the visualisation develops more variation.

The second exercise of the week 7 KKB210: Computational Arts 1 tutorial was to have a look at a couple of files, cube-marilyn.qtz and 5-marilyn.qtz and effectively combine the two. The first file, cube-marilyn.qtz has a rotating cube, with a single Marilyn image on each side similar to what we had to make in the first exercise, except that it has two extra interpolations, so it now has one for each axis that it can rotate on. It also has a different duration on each axis, so it creates the appearance of changing speed. The second file, 5-marilyn.qtz contains a grid of four Marilyn images. They are all the same original image, but each of the four runs variations of exposure adjustments, gamma adjustments, alpha masks, colour inverts and other effects.

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Processing is an open source Java programming environment that was conceived in 2001 by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas, and is continually being maintained and developed by them today along with an ever growing community.

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Impromptu is a programming environment that is intended to assist in the creation of computational arts of all varieties and is completely new to me.

It is designed for OS X, and this is probably part of the reason I have not come across it before since it was only November that I seriously started using a Mac.

Impromptu uses the Scheme programming language and is particularly suited to live programming, however in using it myself, it is obvious that the features built into it to assist live programming make regular programming much easier as well since changes can be made on the fly.

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