Today’s problem was how to write a Snakefile that would apply a user-created mask if one was created when automatic masking was unsuccessful. Snakemake is very python-y under the hood so in a way this should be obvious but it took me some time to figure out. The inputs to a rule can be a python function instead of a static list of files so we can write a Snakefile like the following:

There’s a video available now of the Kima project which I worked on with Eugenia Emets' Analema Group. I was happy with how it turned out on the whole although, like always, there are a tonne of additional things I wish I’d had time to get finished. This was the most complicated art project I’ve worked on in terms of collaboration with other artists and it’s an experience I’d like more of.

I’ve just finished uploading a new ugen for SuperCollider called DFM1. It’s a port of Tony Hardie-Bick’s DFM1 filter, which is a great sounding, overdrivable, self-oscillatable, incredibly detailed model of an analog filter. Full source code is available, so if you’ve got an interest in DSP coding it’d be an excellent example. If you just want to make some strange noise it’s pretty damn good for that as well. You can download DFM1 from here.

I made the switch from TextMate to MacVim about a month ago now and unlike my previous attempts to switch to Vim the change seems to have stuck this time. Of course once you find an editor you like there’s a desire to use it for everything you can and that meant getting scvim working. Here’s how it’s done… Download a copy of the SuperCollider source from the SourceForge page Open up Terminal and cd to supercollider_source/editors/scvim The manual install instructions in the scvim readme are good so have a quick read of that Copy the executables from the bin directory to /usr/local/bin Copy the ftplugin, syntax and indent directories to ~/.

More playing helper monkey from me. This time it was constructing a system of detectors to conjure up a space just from sound. Laura Tarjuman - whose project this is - made a video of the results. Technically this was pretty simple (most of the coding was done in about four hours) but it’s an excellent demonstration of just how easy Processing and Arduino have made integrating software and hardware (a webcam and IR rangers in this case).

It’s been hell of quiet around here recently so I figure I’d put in a quick post covering what I’ve been up to for the past couple of months (not blogging obviously). The main thing was a Reactable and Processing with Vanessa McKeown, a student at Chelsea College of Art & Design. There’s a whole heap of information about that Vanessa’s project blog. The main thing I learnt on this is that debugging problems relating to the detection properties of the Reactable (i.

Solving this problem has been bugging me on and off for ages now so I thought I’d share the solution I eventually came up with. First, the problem: how to do on-the-fly looping of audio in SuperCollider in sync with a sequencer? In this case the sequencer is going to be a very simple example in Processing but the method will work with a hardware drum machine as well. The trick I settled on is to think like an old hardware loop pedal.

After the backward lookinginess of the last three posts I thought a bit of new music might be nice. I picked up an Elektron Monomachine at the weekend and this is the result of the first proper play I’ve had with it: First Monomachine jam It’s a very easy fit with the Machinedrum (unsurprisingly). I haven’t quite figured out how to fit it in with the rest of my existing live setup.

The great link dump concludes (probably, I might put up some of stuff from collaborations at a later date) with the EP I put together in 2006.

The great link dump continues. Part two is a couple of older gig recordings…

Time was, there was a whole load of music on this site. Until I get round to designing a way to present all that again (or just dump it all on Soundcloud) I thought I’d throw up the links as posts.

Rob Munro was kind enough to upload a recording of the set I played at The FleaPit last Thursday. Download it and have a listen if you weren’t able to make it along. I was pleased with how it went on the whole (and was offered another gig afterwards so it can’t have sounded too bad). The main problem was that it took me a couple of minutes to settle into a groove which isn’t ideal from the point of view of hooking people in who might be thinking about popping to the bar.

I’ll be playing at The Fleapit, 45 Columbia Road, E2 on April 15th. Come along!

When I first started to get into the nuts and bolts of sound generation (rather than tweaking someone else’s plugins), I did what a lot of other people do and downloaded Pure Data. It’s a great environment to start playing around in, you connect an oscillator block to a filter block to an output block and you’ve got a little subtractive synth and it’s clear how the signal flows through it.

I made a decision a while back to focus on playing live rather than recording. I’ve spent a lot of time hunched over Cakewalk Sonar tweaking tracks and I daresay I’ll go back to that mode again eventually (or if I’m lucky find a compromise) but right now I want to play. The downside of this is that it can be a bit tricky to explain to people what the hell it is my music actually sounds like.

I’ll be playing at The FleaPit on Columbia Road, London, E2 on February 11th as part of one of OpenLab’s OpenNights

I’m making slow but steady process with the camera simulation. The blurring effect I mentioned at the end of the first post on this is now in there using the low-pass filter code that I posted yesterday. I’m really happy with how that panned out so I thought I’d post another video and the code. I’ve used a bit of off screen drawing to do this which I don’t recall being covered in the Processing documentation so I’ll write that up for another post.

In trying to further humanise my wobbly camera project I needed some of the parameters to change in a way that was linked but with one of the parameters responding at a slower rate. To do this, you need a low pass filter which will be familiar to anyone that’s spent any time making electronic music (anyone else should follow the link). There are a few ways to implement such a filter but for my purposes a quick moving average version was good enough.

I was watching videos of neurons growing this morning (it’s nearly work at least) and it occurred to me that it might be fun to get Processing to draw something similar. I had a whole plan worked out with branching, and making the strands repel one another, maybe a bit of L-system action. Not unusually when experimenting with Processing, I did a little bit of the plan, saw something pretty and got side-tracked, in this case by the trails of particles with brownian motion.

I love Processing in a way that’s almost unseemly for a gentleman and a programming language but there’s something about Java that feels, how can I put this, a bit inelegant and crufty. Lots of braces, lots of type declaration and so on. That feeling put me on a search for a way to do cross-platform graphics in a tidier language. The options that I’ve come up with so far are:

MidiOSC, the MIDI to OSC bridge that I’ve been beavering away on for the past couple of months, is now available for download on GitHub. I wrote it in response to the messed up state of MIDI support in Java on OSX. I do a lot of work with Processing and external hardware that talks MIDI so having things break at random when the OS was upgraded wasn’t a good thing for me.

I was digging through some of my old Processing sketches to find something to generate the background for this page when I stumbled across an experiment in particle systems that I’d been working on. The sketch generates a crude approximation of a gravitational field and then drops a load of particles on that change velocity according to their location. As you can see in the video this can lead to some nicely chaotic behaviour.

A New Year resolution