Almost April

Not too much more to report on about my final. So far I have been finishing up the book, as well as researching materials from the other one. Learning to read text and internet files was a big step in my project, so I think I am still on track. I am excited that we can focus on the final project now, and progress weekly towards finishing that. This week I will work on pulling sound from an image. I have been looking at midi files and how they are represented by letters and numbers. I have a lot to learn about that as well.

Final Project Direction

I am continuing research on sound and music in processing. I am still interested in storing data in a visual format. Even if my project ends up only storing a few notes on a sheet of paper, I will be happy. Right now there are a few big issues that I still need to adress. 1. Simplify Midi music tones or an even simpler format to as few notes as possible. Give each note a unique shape and color/texture value. Format processing to output this data into a visual piece. 2. A way to read back the visual data back into processing to create the midi file again. I envision that a scanner would work well for the purposes I need. 3. Processing has to be able to read back the data on the page. It would have to follow a certain timeline and find colors and analyze them to pull out the notes. It could re-create a midi file and play it. Eventually I would like to have a handheld scanner that could create music from any surface. What would a gallery wall sound like if you could hear music in it. I still need to research more. Maybe I should just jump to the ability to read sound in textures instead of creating my own system for encoding.

I keep finding people working with music

I was flipping through the Blue and found another artist who did interesting work with sound. Shape of Song by Martin Wattenberg is a great project that starts to constuct a pattern created by identical groups of notes in a song. I find it very interesting and relavent to the work I am doing. I wonder if I will need to use midi music instead of an mp3 to store the data I want to.

Research

So I looked up the term 'Digital Media' at UF libraries and there were only about 20 books or so that contained that phrase. It was kind of surprising. There are so many different things poeple are doing with the field in film, programming, photography. Not many poeple have choosen to get all of this work in one place though.

Well while reading Digital Art by Christiane Paul, I came across a piece by Nam June Paik called Random Access. I had one of those moments where I had been wanting to do a project for a long time and then have realized that it has been done before (and in 1963 for that matter). Anyway the piece involves a collection of cassete tape tacked to the wall, and a reading head that a viewer could run across the magnetized surface, to hear a bunch of different audio collections. My idea for a piece like this though is being able to encode data visually where it could be read back and played to the system. I kind of have an idea in my head that if you can somehow program texture and color into sound, you could hear any surface. I ask myself what would a Pollock sound like compared to the wall it was hung on.

Other books I looked at were two by John Maeda. I found them really interesting to read because the creators of Processing, have their student work in the book. I believe processing was their thesis project or something similar. Anyway the books have a lot of great insight into the field and into being a creative professional in general. Especially exciting is to see how someone can jump from being a porgrammer most of his life, to a well known artist and professor. He gives much of his insight on life, learning, design, art, programming, and history of the field. Its a good read.

Blog Created

Here it is. A blog for the last few weeks of classes. I will be posting ideas here as well as links and videos to things that are influencing my programming. Thanks for looking