Ephemeral Recordings

A system for imprecise, ephemeral transmission of sound data

Visualizations for new Display

Over the last couple months I’ve had the chance to develop a series of “paintings” for the fiberoptic tapestry, a new display system developed by artists Ligorano/Reese. It is essentially a hand-woven canvas of optic fibers, each illuminated by an electronically-controlled LED. The result is incredibly beautiful and expressive, producing a painterly effect. I was [...]

Reverse Engineering the Speaking Piano

How Puredata can be used to translate sound to a restricted sequence of discrete notes.

Wind Carol

It’s that time of year again. Christmas is coming, snow is falling outside my window, and the wind is whistling.  Maybe it’s late, or my mind is playing tricks on me, but the wind seems a bit more coherent than usual… Musical, even. Creepy.
windsong.mp3
This is how I’d like to imagine the first Christmas–even the wind [...]

Pure Data: The Swiss Army Knife of Audio

After a weekend workshop (thanks to Hans-Christoph Steiner and Eyebeam) on Pure Data, I’ve been tinkering with it quite a bit lately and geeking out on old signal processing stuff I haven’t touched since college.
Over the years I’ve played with a number of tools for audio processing: Matlab, jMusic, a Java library for algorithmic composition, Nyquist, a [...]

Tangible Drawing Interfaces

An experiment with tangible interfaces allowing on-screen drawing using assorted physical objects, each of which have a specific function.

Web Cam Heart Rate Monitor

How to measure your heart rate with a webcam and some Processing code.

Text on a Curve

I’m researching methods to render text along a path, like you can easily do in Illustrator. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple in Processing (unless someone knows of a library that does this).

You can find a demo and the source here. Click four times to set the curve points and handles. Move the mouse left and [...]

Making a Stacked Area Chart With Processing

In order to visualize multiple variables in a single time series, a stacked area (sometimes called a “stream”) chart is often useful. I am currently doing research for an upcoming visualization that will trace the development of ideas through a conversation. Unable to find processing code to create an area chart, I decided to write [...]

Van Gogh, Remixed

When you find old van Gogh images on your computer, what could be more logical than to shatter them into a thousand abstract pieces and rearrange?
This image was the first experimenting with this process. Pretty ugly. I don’t know what I was going for. It was late.

The second in the series came from a cell image. [...]

The Color of Rhyme

Over the last few weeks I’ve been exploring language and words and how to deal with them algorithmically. Lately I’ve been thinking about ways to visualize various aspects of language, and one of the first that came to mind was the idea of representing the sound of words with color.
I am using the Carnegie Mellon [...]

Natural Language Processing

I have become increasingly interested in tools to perform natural language processing. So much of how we approach and see problems is tied up in the words we find to describe them. I am currently exploring ways to use language to help define and understand problems as well as get out of creative blocks.
Below are [...]

Nest

Enemies of Creating: Consumption, Distraction, and Demoralization

Everyone has one of those days at times—you reach the end and wonder where all your time went. Worse, you realize you haven’t done anything productive at all. And worse still, some of us can look back not just to days, but months or longer periods.
With increasing regularity I have heard the following message in [...]

Past Photos

Photography has been one of my favorite creative outlets since my dad bought me my first digital camera when I turned 18. In this album are a few of my favorites from over the years. Click on any of the images to go to my flickr site, where yet more photos eagerly await you.

Musical Meanderings

My first love has always been music. On and off since the age of fourteen or so, I’ve been writing and recording small musical sketches. As I have time to pull things out of my archive I’ll post them here.
Clarinet Jam Recorded over the 2007 Christmas break shortly after impulsively buying an old French-made Buffet [...]

Relative Value Judgements

How is it that we find ourselves continually buying things we don’t really need? A look at the irrational behavior of decision making sheds light on the recent time-wasting use of some software with a very cool feature.

Singlespeed Software

I created this logo for a friend’s new software company, which was named after single-speed bicycles, elegant machines with only one cog in the rear. The main idea came almost immediately: rotate the letter S three times to create a cog. Ultimately, the typeface Mercury was used due to its sharp serifs which looked more [...]

Does place matter?

While reading the book Rapt by Winifred Gallagher (or more accurately, listening to in the car on a long road trip), I found chapter 8, “Decisions — focusing illusions,” partuclarly interesting.  The main thesis of the book is that we shape our lives by what we choose to focus on, or not focus on.  Furthermore, [...]

Red Clay Coffee Co.

The following logo was designed for a new coffee shop in Oklahoma. The color scheme is based on the color of Oklahoma’s red clay, while the two parallel lines represent strata of the earth. The curve could be seen to mimic the shape of a saucer and the baroque direction was selected for its positive [...]

DVD

It was said that my grandfather spent more money on film than virtually anything else but perhaps his children’s education. Recording the memories of his family for generations to come was a great priority, as evidenced by the use of costly 16mm film, elaborate lighting setups, and obsessive care and organization of the film archives. [...]