Visualization

  • What's the world listening to?

    July 8, 2010

    A while back I crafted a Processing sketch that displayed a map of the world and popped up the most popular artist for the country the mouse was hovering over. Bored last night, I decided to give the newish Google Maps API a whirl and see if I could recreate the sketch for the web.

    It uses fxb's javascript-last.fm-api library which made the artist lookup incredibly easy. The whole thing took no more than 2 hours.

    Categories: Fun, Programming, Visualization

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    Dancing Circles

    Oct. 13, 2008

    OK, it's finally time to show my circles on here. I've tried and tried to make a video of them but the each frame render takes too much time and the video ends up being longer that the actual time I was recording for.

    There are workarounds but I like playing the thing "live" - pressing buttons to move the circles about. There are a few photos in my Flickr Processing set.

    So .. if you can be bothered there is a 30MB download. It's because Sonia likes Wav files and dislikes MP3s. Like I say, I wanted to stick a video on Vimeo but that was proving a pain. Each circle represents an "FFT bin" and the diameter its level.

    Download:

    The intention is that the user controls the visualization. Push the circles to the bottom for the quite bits, then explode them up when the music kicks in ... whatever. There's a bug I left in deliberately: after using the hard left or right controls pressing the space bar makes the circles move along the X axis quickly, then the Y axis slowly. It's kinda nice. If it annoys you reset the visualization (see controls below).

    Controls (all lower case):

    • wasd - hard UP, LEFT, DOWN, RIGHT
    • Space - move to random location
    • m - move to centre of window
    • c - randomize colours
    • i - reset circle positions, movement speeds and randomize colours
    • r - circles run away from the mouse
    • Arrow keys - nudge circles
    • q - quit

    Source code, created by Processing mangling my source into Java is provided in the download. It's not particularly neat code, but this didn't take particularly long to make!

    Take it easy.

    Categories: Fun, Processing, Visualization

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Something I saw

… and put on flickr.

Something I heard

… according to last.fm.

  • Portico Quartet - Pompidou
  • Portico Quartet - Cittàgazze
  • Portico Quartet - The Kon Tiki Expedition
  • Portico Quartet - Too Many Cooks
  • Portico Quartet - Knee-Deep In The North Sea