I decided to start off with a halo generator to create a similar effect to a lens flare which I then built on with audio input from the MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone to make it a more interesting effect. Adding in a replicate in space which chances direction over 8 replications gives it the appearance of movement amongst itself, again making it a bit more interesting, but what I really like about this is that it turns it into a colourful iris, which I really quite like.

When the audio is fairly quiet, the iris is small and fades in and out. As the audio volume increases, the iris grows and changes colour.

It can be downloaded here, you are welcome to have a look and play around with it as you like! Just remember, like everything else on this website, it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. So anything you do with it must attribute me as the original artist, me, be shared under a share alike license and cannot be used commercially.

This has been done in Quartz Composer for OS X 10.5 Leopard, so it may not work correctly on Tiger. I don’t think I’ve used anything that was new in Leopard, but I’m not sure. So if you are using Tiger, good luck!

I’ve rendered a video which is now up on YouTube to give you an idea of how it looks.

The screen recording here has taken the mic input and used it for the animation. The song used in this recording is “Deflated & Alone (GE Abondoned mix)” by George_Ellinas from http://ccmixter.org/files/George_Ellinas/19174 under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

At the moment, it is great for a little while, but unless the music is constantly changing, the interest is lost as it begins to show similar patterns repeating themselves. If you have a look at the Quartz Composition, it’s a pretty simple one really, so I’m sure there is plenty more I can do with it yet to make it that bit more interesting for a bit longer!

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.

Now, the actual exercise is to take the image variations from the grid of the second file and apply them to each side of the rotating cube in the first. So each side of it will have the same four images with all of the effects and so on applied to them.

For me, rather than playing around with it, the best way to do this was to look at how each of the images had been done on the second file and then apply the same things to the images on the cube. It could easily enough be done using different effects on each side as well as each image, by duplicating the “Render in Image” patch a few times and applying each one to a different side (rather than the same one to each side), and then editing the image effects for each one individually.

The full size screenshots of the macro patches are available by clicking the above thumbnails. The .qtz file is available here, and the Quicktime movie is available here. There is one thing not shown in the above screenshots. When you double click the Render in Image patch, it takes you to four Macro Patches. These patches are the ones that contain the information in the second screenshot above. Each one of them applies to a different image in the grid.

Processing is available for Mac OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux, so you can use it on pretty much anything. This is a big bonus since it was designed with the intention of being a live programming environment for Java as well as a computational design education tool.

As Java is cross-platform, it is only logical that Processing be as well.

In 2005, Processing won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica international cyber-arts competition. Subsequently in 2006 the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Fry and Reas with a New Media Fellowship in order to help fund and support the continued development of Processing environment.

Processing has been used in quite a few big productions as well, aside from live programming (also know as VJing). Fry alone has had works created using Processing appear in the movies “The Hulk” and “Minority Report”.

Considering how widely it is used and how long it has been around, it is interesting to note, that it is currently only in version 1.0 BETA still.

Processing aims to remove the need to spend time setting up a graphics rendering environment, it’s already done. So all you need to do is get in there and code some graphics.

The Processing Development Environment (PDE) is designed to behave much like a sketchbook. Just open a new tab and you’ve got a new file to code in, it’s as simple as that. This keeps all of your related sketches (programs) in an easy to navigate “sketchbook”.

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.

Impromptu is developed by Andrew Sorenson from QUT. As I am studying computational arts at QUT, it would be almost impossible to not come across Impromptu sooner or later.

My tutor and lecturer have both commented that as far as generating computational audio, Impromptu is one of the best development environments as it is oriented strongly around time and timing so that things can be scheduled accurately. Apparently other environments over periods of time can start to get slightly out of time, where Impromptu doesn’t.

It also supports a whole heap of graphic generating options, such as OpenGL rendering and vector drawing, along with many more, which is quite nice.

I haven’t used it in depth, but my experience with it thus far is that it is very straight forward and simple to use. I have never written anything in Scheme before, but it seems easy to learn and the Impromptu environment helps make it even easier.

The audio that is used is MIDI generated and follows the standard outlined on the MIDI Manufacturers Association website.

Thus far I have seen examples of and written my own drum kit, bass line, and I have been experimenting with an entire musical piece as well, slowly. I’ll be going through these things a bit later on.