Friday, August 28, 2009

Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up

live coding




live coding - A new thing in London where music coders write code that makes music and sounds live (like in Chuck or Max/MSP). Neato!





Dave sums it up: "It's such a new thing, and we don't know if we're any good at it - it may well be that a new generation comes along and just blows us away".

I googled "live coding", and what came up was On-the-fly Programming :
Using Code as an Expressive Musical Instrument (or live coding)
by Ge Wang and Perry Cook. That is so cool.

I met Ge Wang last week at ICMC 2009. He gave two really awesome talks, one about smule and one about slork.

Yes, this is my life, and it rocks. :)


neptune




Web-linked observatory will make deep sea visible to all - NEPTUNE project in the Globe and Mail.



Thursday, August 27, 2009

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

persona




Personas, an MIT-based project that began as an art installation. Beautiful design, but really lacking the data and algorithms, a search on my name (both Steven Ness and sness) didn't produce anything interesting.

What we need is beautiful design coupled with hardcore algorithms and data.

This is my mission.



Monday, August 24, 2009

eamcs23



gfs



tides



img




Writing an Image, Multiple Times with convert in ImageMagick. Super useful, and turned a process that would have taken years into one that will just take a month or so (!) on a four core Mac Pro.

Before, each conversion of a .wav file from The Orchive to all the .jpg images required would have to run each one as a seperate "convert" job, which was taking about an hour per .wav file! Now, it runs in about a minute.



cursor



1.9



ardeth



sync



mmm candy



Saturday, August 22, 2009

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Drumming Along with Battles - ENGR 466 at UVic

I'm helping with this project, I wrote the code that listens to the music file and sends out MIDI notes to the robot drummer. Funky stuff!

Friday, August 14, 2009

pvk




Recordings by Peter van Kranenburg, a visiting scholar in our lab.



Thursday, August 13, 2009

hardcore magick




I'm slicing up some massive png files with Imagemagick's convert program for the Orchive, and have to generate more than 100 slices of a huge 300MB image. It was taking quite a while to do each one individually, so I found this great resource on writing multiple images with one convert command:


convert cyclops.gif -fill lightsteelblue -draw 'color 0,0 floodfill' \
\( +clone -resize x128 -write cyclops_lrg.jpg +delete \) \
\( +clone -resize x96 -write cyclops_big.jpg +delete \) \
\( +clone -resize x64 -write cyclops_med.jpg +delete \) \
-resize x32 cyclops_sml.jpg


Works super well, and much faster than before.


Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Sunday, August 02, 2009