out of sound design projects, the framesync library
Posted on Monday, 22 November
One of the things that I find most interesting and useful about free software is how the tool gets developed as part of the process of making the result. I was just working on the sound design for the video Undervine, which is a visualization of data about the wine industry. I’ve worked on a couple other data vis projects, and some sound design for video in different contexts. I used Pure Data for these projects because I’m deeply involved in it. So out of these projects, I’ve started developing a library to make it really easy to sync up sounds with video, then make it easy to skip around and compose while keeping everything easy and in sync.
This library is starting to take shape, and I’ve started to document it, not only for others, but also to remind myself how to use the things inside. If you are interested, check it out: framesync
Posted on Sunday, 21 November
As I was working away on the sound for Undervine, I was struck at this particular moment at how synthetic the result looks as compared to something like a song.
Posted on Sunday, 21 November
Now that Undervine, the data vis/sonification project I have been working on, is done and up on the wall at SFMOMA, I want to show a few clips of things that didn’t make the final cut. Starting with this clip about global wine production. We were trying to show how global wine production peaked in the 70s and then stayed about the same. Meanwhile, the portion of wine production everywhere that was exported anywhere increased quite a bit. The sound here was used to highlight the record years in wine production, which is represented visually by the grey backing circle (graphics by Bobby Pietrusko and Stewart Smith).
Posted on Tuesday, 16 November
I’m deep in the process of finalizing the sound design for a data visualization video about the wine industry that’ll be part of SFMOMA’s upcoming exhibit on wine. I thought I’d pause for a second and document the piles of windows that have accumulated in the process. I haven’t ditched Mac OS X yet, but otherwise I am happily using all free tools: Pd-extended, Audacity, TextEdit and Chrome. I’ve recently ditched QuickTime in favor of Gem for displaying the video as I am generating sound for it. This way I have a single synced control for audio and video playback.
Posted on Wednesday, 27 October
Today I was working with DMX, a lighting control protocol. Eyebeam’s theatre lighting is controlled by DMX so I was sitting here in the main space annoying everyone with flickering lights as I got things working. I got a skpang DMX shield to attach to an Arduino. I then wrote an Arduino firmware using the Firmata and DmxSimple libraries so that I could send DMX from Pd.
