I have been doing video analysis on QuickTime (.mov) files for several years, but have never really had the need to use the time information of the movie files. For a project, I now had the need for getting the timecode in seconds out of the files, and this turned out to be a little more tricky than first expected. Hence this little summary for other people that may be in the same situation. ...
The Norwegian Academy of Music launched their new web page and logo today. As part of the visual profile, they wanted to create a dynamic logo, continuously reflecting the activities at the school. I was asked to contribute to making this new dynamic logo dynamic, and we ended up basing the system on analysis of the sound of the school. ...
I am currently in beautiful Aldeburgh, a small town on the east coast of England, teaching at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme together with Rolf Wallin and Tansy Davies. This post is mainly to summarise the things I have been going through, and provide links for various things. Theoretical stuff My introductory lectures went through some of the theory of an embodied understanding of the experience of music. One aspect of this theory that I find very relevant for the development of interactive works is what I call action-sound relationships. By this I mean that we have an intuitive understanding of how certain actions may produce certain sounds. This is the cognitive basis for the fact that we can “hear” an action we only see, and “see” the action of a sound we can only hear. These ideas are presented and discussed more thoroughly in my PhD dissertation. ...
I will participate in a motion capture workshop at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) tomorrow. My contribution will consist of the following: Lecture: Introduction to motion capture (in music analysis and performance) Demo 1: Working with video analysis using the Musical Gestures Toolbox Demo 2: The Xsens MVN BioMech mobile mocap suit Workshop: Analysis and performance with Wii controllers, Phidgets accelerometers and Kinect Below are various resources. ...
Andrew Benson just posted a short tutorial on how to use the built in SQL tools in Max 5. Databases seems to be the future, also in music, and it is incredibly cool to have the ability to work on this from within Max.
One of my reasons for developing motiongrams was to have a solution for visualising movement in a way that would be compatible to spectrograms. That way it would be possible to study how movement is evolving over time, in relation to how the audio is changing over time. In my current implementation of motiongrams in Max/MSP/Jitter (and partially in EyesWeb), there has been no way to synchronise with a spectrogram. The problem was that the built-in spectrogram in Max/MSP was running much faster than the motiongram, and they was therefore out of sync from the start. The same was the case in EyesWeb. ...
Richard Widerberg held a workshop today on using mobile python on Nokia phones running Symbian OS S60. He has gathered some links to everything that is needed to get a connection up and running with PD. Now I got a simple script up and running and communicating with Max/MSP through the serial object. It works, but it feels a bit limiting to only have one-dimensional control joystick up/down + number keys for interaction. I should definitely get a phone with an accelerometer to test some more motion related applications.
Cycling ‘74 has released Max 5! I have been beta-testing the software for some time now, and can highly recommend the update. There has been a lot of discussion about the new “rounded corners”, but Max 5 is so much more about improvements and workflow. What I like the most about Max 5 is the presentation mode, which allows for separating the “code” from the user interface. This greatly enhances creating more complex patches with a neat little interface on top, since you can easily select which objects to include in the presentation, and then rearrange them as you like.
I have had problems with SubEthaEdit making Max/MSP .mxo externals show up as folders instead of packages. I type the solution here so that I won’t get forget it anymore (thanks to jasch for figuring this out): Right click on SubEthaEdit and select “show package contents” Open the Info.plist file in a text editor Remove the line with mxo Save and restart
Following an interesting thread on careers in Max/MSP, I came across a link to Joshs Rules of Database Contracting. I particularly like these ones: Ask Not Whats Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait. Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget. Cutting the budget by 30% will quadruple the amount of time. All Estimates are Optimistic: new application development will take three times as long as you expect, and cost twice as much. Or vice-versa.