#043: Das Kollektiv

This is the first time one of my artworks is inspired by music! The song in question is Das Kollektiv by ASP. I’m taking a fairly literal interpretation of a swarm of little entities in between the walls, sucking out the essence of the “guests”. The images are pretty dark; you might need high contrast settings.

#044: Into Oblivion

This next one isn’t just inspired by music, but directly driven by it! There is already a post about it, so I’ll just post the visuals here.

Here is a video using a shortened version of Push Every Button by Lapfox:

#045: Canada’s Marvelous Singing & Dancing Animals

The next one is an animation driven by music – less a visualizer, because it needed to be heavily parameterized and the song isn’t as exchangeable. It’s also, uh, slightly more silly than the previous one.

The song is Python by Rolemusic and the images used are all public domain/CC0.

(Oh, and if you wonder why you can’t find this in the repository: It was made with Unity3D, not Processing.)

#046: A Slice of π

When making Into Oblivion, I was a bit frustrated that it was rather hard to gain good information from the FFT analysis and that it was utterly impossible to find which instrument was playing. I found both in MOD files.

If you want to learn more about it, head over to this blog post.

The song used are, in order:

• Rivendell by radix
• phantasmagoria by 4mat
• rsectro by 4mat
• zapped_out by 4mat

#047: Fractal Flames

After finding out about fractal flames in Apophysis 7x and discovering in the fractal flames paper by Scott Draves that the algorithm that creates those beautiful images is (for the most part) actually pretty straightforward, I just had to implement this myself in Processing. So yeah, nothing original here, but I had a lot of fun with this.

What fascinates me most is that the algorithm is based on an extremely simple concept: Pick a random position, transform it with a formula, draw a dot, transform it again, draw a dot, repeat. Throw in a few parameters and coloring based on how often a dot is visited. Then layer multiple of these formulas together. Nothing arcane here, yet the resulting images look both pleasing and complex!

#048: A Stroke of Color

The next one isn’t original either: I tried to recreate something similar to the stunning Composition #72 by Patrick Gunderson.

#049: Burrowers

And the last one for this batch. Just a few agents, running around, drawing lines, carving a nest for themselves in the digital earth.

As always, the source code for most of these can be found at the GitHub repository, open sourced under the MIT License.

If you want to run the sketches yourself, you just need to download Processing and open the PDE files. Sometimes you need to add a library, but mostly it’s really straightforward. If you need any help doing that, just send me a mail or comment here.

Unlike audio files like mp3, module files aren’t rendered down to just the audio information. Simplified, they have two elements: A collection of distinct audio samples and tracker information when to play which sample and how to modify its pitch, volume and other properties. So that means if your visualizer is a MOD player, you have all this juicy information available at your fingertips!

So there were a few things I needed:

• MOD files: I got those from ModArchive.org. I chose:
  • chiptune, phantasmagoria, rsectro and zapped_out by 4mat
  • Rivendell by radix
• A MOD tracker to analyze the MOD files: OpenMPT filled that spot quite nicely and was easy to get into even for a total beginner like me.
• A MOD processing library – of which I only found one! Luckily, PortaMod has (nearly) everything I needed, and the creator Brendan Ratliff was most helpful on Twitter.

Since this was my first foray into MOD music visualization and I wasn’t cooperating with a musician, I wanted to keep the visualizer as general as possible; any file that it could play should work. I also wanted to use as much information as possible. In the end, I chose a rotating circular representation divided into slices. Each slice is a MOD channel and each MOD sample was assigned a color. Pitch modifications made the radius go bigger, and everything is pulsating according to the output amplitude.

Downloads:

Executable for Windows
GitHub Repository (MIT License)

And now there’s been enough talk – have a preview video and a few screenshots!

The song used are, in order:

• Rivendell by radix
• phantasmagoria by 4mat
• rsectro by 4mat
• zapped_out by 4mat

The song is Python by Rolemusic and the images used are all public domain/CC0.

If any of the animals aren’t Canadian after all, this is an unintentional error; I just identified them by the way they move their snouts.

I’ve used spectrum analysis (powered by minim) and Processing to make a reactive artwork. It works especially for songs with breaks and theme changes where it becomes really apparent that the result is really dependent on the currently played music.

If you are Windows, you can download it here – edit the default.xml to use your own music, change the color scheme. Check out the readme for the controls!

The source code is, as always for my generative art in Processing, available at the GitHub repository and open source. You can open it with Processing 3 – just import Minim.

Here is a video using a shortened version of Push Every Button by Lapfox: