psyche

Here’s an application that synthesizes typography and sound synthesis. The video output expresses the type as a sound.

dynamic charted music from Colin Owens on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of music I composed called “Number Station.” The visualizations are generated by the volume of each channel from the original multitrack file.

Generated using Processing and Minim libraries with 14 channels of streaming audio on an unbelievably fast machine.

I have posted proof-of-concept videos for three core thesis projects:

1. cueTag–Software for image and film analysis based on composer’s cues.
2. Associative Synaesthesis Mixer–An experiment in making assoications between sound, motion and image.
3. shapeMix–A tool for mixing sound in visual space.

I’ve posted the latest version of the audio visualizer, with the latest tunes from an album my father and I are working on.

Built in processing with the minim library.

I have been having serial dreams for as long as I can remember. “Serial dreams” are what I call them because I have dreams with overlapping landscapes with central themes. Sometimes seemingly opposing or different themes “break through” from one to the next with overlapping features or actions taken by the dreams themselves. There are people in these dreams, sure, but it is the landscapes and objects that bind them. The dreams are timeless and can span decades.
If the narrative of dreams is spacial, then time lives somewhat outside of the narrative. How does the mind make connections between scenes that seem disparate or disjointed? What is the difference between awake and asleep?

A designed object is an object of interest. If the object is interesting, why not make it part of the narrative? A playstation/ Xbox controller can trace its roots in handicrafts or pottery, where the interaction is closed around the body and the actions all take place around a small area of a semi-circle. A wiimote is a shortened stick very similar to the style of stick our ancestors used to chip away at nuts and presumably write messages on the ground for one another. What makes the wiimote different is the ability of the person using it to transform it into a metaphorical object capable of becoming anything.

What would a narrative controller look like in the dream world? It couldn’t be something stationary. It couldn’t be something you hold on to.

A controller in the narrative world would have to have to be an embedded symbol or a type of motion that would work well in the dream landscape. An entirely gestural interface–One without a hand-held object would be the best.

If you were a video editor or small production studio and you wanted to lay down some music on a film, you could use Abaltat’s Muse.

But I see this technology as much more significant than a suggested attempt to put composers on the dole.

Mark Altekruse at Abaltat suggested that as a composer, I could use this to sketch out ideas. He was right: Inside of an hour I was inserting cue points into the timeline and adjusting instrumentation according to color information.

It was a much different composing experience. Instead of writing a piece of music and then plopping it down onto the scene, I could essentially work backwards. By laying down a sketch, I could think about what mood or depth of instrumentation I could use and work out the timing, instead of worrying about the details of the music too early on.

Muse's Color Timeline

The wonderful part is that Muse allows one to export sound files and midi files for placement (exporting cues to AAF files doesn’t seem to be an option yet) and for perfectly reasonable use.Changing the scale of the current composition is quite easy. I could see using Muse on a tight deadline.

What’s most exciting is that Muse is a truly synaesthetic tool for creating dynamic sound from image.

This is a You-Tube-Like site for posting and tagging videos on the time line. This not only opens up the door to “online editing” but makes finding content within video useful. In the future I imagine seeing search results from google being a bit more useful. That is, if people tag their content usefully.

I was pointed to this site by my friends at The SEA, who are working with Viddler.

Dragon is a tool developed by the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University. It allows for direct manipulation of objects on the screen according to their trajectory. In their study, they  found that users preferred this method of interaction over a basic slider because it gave them more perceptual control. In the screen grab of their video (on the Dragon project page) you can click on the object to move it in time and trajectory.

Infinite scroll proof-of-concept from Colin Owens on Vimeo.

If the government had access to all of your information and they had the wherewithal to put it together, they might put something like this together.

I created this video as a response to a DMI exercise called “you are here.” The idea is that you could be anywhere in your (electronic) life at any point just by scrolling and pulling apart different points in time.

Anticipation from Colin Owens on Vimeo.

It’s easier to coax a coffee machine to do your bidding than it is to get a cat to jump.