Homework week 3

a) make a composition using the animation techniques that is a tribute to john whitney. See for example: profile, info, videos, catalog (made in 1961! non-digital!), video we watched in class



For this one I created an if statement that flips the rotation between clockwise and counter clockwise based on modulous of the elapsed time. I also had some fun with the push and pop matrix, rotating the X, Y and Z.

CODE ZIPPED

b) Since we talked in class about this idea of a relationship between sound and visual synthesis (and harmony) find a short piece of music (can be any duration as long as there are multiple notes - a short snippet, or a long song) and make a composition that is a visual equivalent of that sound. Think about how the make a visual equivalent using the techniques we talked about this week. Post both the sound and the resulting animation. Try to bring out some essential truth of the audio through the visualization.



In class we used ideas of sound wave modulation (AM, FM), to understand how sine and cosine and other trigonometric functions can be used to create more organic visual animations. This homework was an extension of that. I took a house music track by the artist Claude Von Stroke and tried to visually represent it. I used circles to symbolize the "rounder" sounds of the drums (particularly the bass drum), and I used triangles to represent the harder sounds of the high hats. I also thought they lent the visuals a disco ball kind of feel that was appropriate. There's also a circle that sort of bobs around to represent the bouncy swing of the track overall. The moving square is just a sequencer that underscores the overall structure and repeditiveness of the 4/4 beat. I used a number of different techniques to get everything to sync the way I wanted. The square's movement is based on arrays of X and Y positions. It cycles through them based on the sine of the elapsed time. Most of the animations are similarly tied to the eleapsed time so that I could keep everything in sync with each other. I figured out the relationship of beats per minute to frames per second to sync the visuals to the song tempo. After I did that I realized that since the animations were based on the elapsed time, adjusting the frames per second wouldn't line everything up. The way I managed to get them in sync was to scale the Sine of the elapsed time so that its 2 pi cycle of 6.28 would correspond to the BPM. The song's BPM of 125 works out to be a cycle of about 2.08 beats per second. I'm still not sure if I got it working perfectly, but it seems to sync pretty good, and I think even if my math wasn't perfect, I was on the right track.

CODE ZIPPED

c) try to use sin and cos to emulate a natural phenomenon (ie, something you see in the natural world). be sure to provide some documentation (video / picture / text) of what this phenomenon is.



Phi as represented by Fibonnaci series of golden rectangles.



Phi again represented by Fibonnaci series with arcs.



Phi in nature: Nautilus Shell



Human face divided into golden rectangles



My natural inclination for this assignment was to do something with phi (aka the golden ratio). I've been playing music for a long time and was familiar with phi in that context, but also knew that it extends to many things in nature, from flowers, to dna strands, to the proportions of bugs, nautilus shells, and human bodies. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get the code to draw golden rectangles in ever increasing sizes, all in phi relationship to each other. In the end I hoped to have something elegant and beautiful, but I burnt out before I managed that. Still, I think I tackled some of the challenges of working with phi and I have a good starting point for anything I want to do with it down the road.

CODE ZIPPED

d) extend the xeno / atan2 code, making a creature which follows the mouse. think of how you could use sinusoidal animation techniques to give the object some "life" - breathing, blinking, etc.



I spent a lot of time on this one. I really wanted to make a xeno creature out of smoke. In the end, I wound up with a little ghost who shoots bubbles or something. I really just wanted to do something other than make a creature with an array of xenos for a tail. I think with more work I could get this working better. I started making objects inside objects and I had trouble keeping track of all the code, so I wound up scaling things back from what I originally planned.

CODE ZIPPED