Getting Somewhere February 27, 2008
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Week…Whatever It Is February 25, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , add a commentNot much to report just yet; with Spring Break approaching, I’ve been kept busy with midterms, reports, and other major assignments, two of which are due tomorrow. However, after that point I’m practically home free, and I fully intend to spend considerable time in SL tomorrow evening and Wednesday afternoon prior to the meeting, so I should have something more significant to show for the time.
Meantime, these YouTube videos are a demonstration of the visualization which I will be attempting to replicate:
I’ve had a little trouble getting these videos to come up tonight, but hopefully that’s just a temporary YouTube or network issue. Let me know if you can’t see them and I’ll try to work it out.
Approx. Hours: 2-ish
Week 4 February 18, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , 2commentsOkay, I’ll openly admit that this week’s progress has been pretty lame. I didn’t have as much time to put into it as usual (though I think this past week will be the exception rather than the rule) and Second Life classes have been particularly uncooperative with my schedule. So, the rundown of what I’ve done.
I read another paper, the last of the three which presents a particular visualization from the special issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment. Here’s the citation:
Sapp, Craig Stuart. ”Visual Hierarchical Key Analysis.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 19 pages.
This article was a little more explicit about its methodology than some of the earlier ones, but problematically the music theory and statistics are a bit over my head at this point. That stuff’s pretty high-level, it seems, in a field of which I have no real knowledge. Further, this visualization doesn’t lend itself to the Second Life method quite as well (though I don’t feel like any of the visualizations I’ve encountered so far really lend themselves to being done in Second Life, to be frank). Like the others, it has videos which I hope to post in the near future (see below).
I’ve also, as Mike suggested, looked up how Windows Media does its music visualizations. I came across the Microsoft Developer Network site, which has information on developing plug-ins and things for various MS programs, including visualizations for Windows Media. The visualizations are programmed in MS Visual C++, and there is a method which allows the player to send a periodic “snapshot” of the music being played in the form of a two-dimensional array containing frequency and waveform data. That data can be passed around in C++ code as integers, allowing visualization developers to use it to affect draw commands to the screen. Conceptually simple, if not enormously helpful when it comes to more “scientific” visualizations, but still good to know.
The other major thing I’ve done this past week, aside from some very basic tooling around Second Life which really didn’t amount to much (how do I get to the right island now that I’ve accepted your friendship, Dr. Polack?), is try to get some of the things I need working on my computer (or, in some cases, working again, in the wake of my hard drive loss). This includes Second Life, since it would just be more convenient to use in my room (especially on weekends when the lab is occupied by events like the VGO…not that I would’ve been working Saturday night, but hypothetically…) and Quicktime so that I can view those videos. I’ve had some major network issues with doing any of this, however. Over the weekend I couldn’t get any downloads to even start; the connection would always time out. Today I had a little more success: the downloads would begin, and even run pretty well for a time, but always dropped to 0 KB/sec after a while, and then canceled themselves a short time later (some error about the source file being unreadable). In short, after more than an hour of trying to get some of this software on my laptop, I am no closer to being able to use my laptop for anything useful.
I’ve also got an SL class later tonight, NCI’s Building 3. That will be my second building class. I’ve also got a couple general intro classes which taught the basics of rezzing, scripting, texturing, and using SL, as well as several scripting classes. The class tonight should take an hour.
Total time (counting tonight’s class): 4 hours.
Week 3 February 11, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , 2commentsOkay, so this week I wanted to post several resources I’ve found so far, but then my hard drive ceased to function. I had a few things on there that I haven’t been able to find again. I’ll post them when I come across them. Meantime, I’ve still got a fair number of resources which I had hard copies of, and which I was able to find online again, so I’ll go ahead and talk about those in brief.
The following papers are all from a special issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment. The contents of that entire issue can be accessed through the ACM Digital Library here.
Krumhansl, Carol L. “The Geometry of Musical Structure: A Brief Introduction and History.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 14 pages.
This paper opened the special issue, and so set some serious music theory background for the reader so that he/she could better comprehend the later papers which deal directly with specific music visualizations. Most of this article dealt with music theory and past, non-computer visualizations, and explained a lot of music theory concepts (like the circle of fifths). Admittedly, I didn’t find it to be the best introduction to such material for the uninitiated; I am still substantially fuzzy on parts of the theory involved, a problem which I shall endeavor to remedy in the near future.
Toiviainen, Petri. “Visualization of Tonal Content with Self-Organizing Maps and Self-Similarity Matrices.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 10 pages.
This paper deals directly with a specific visualization. I admit to not completely understanding some of the math behind the concepts at work here, but basically this visualization maps the tonal content of a piece of music (in MIDI format) in real-time, and color-codes tones according to how similar they are (largely, I think, based upon the key of the piece). The visualization itself - specifically what the colors mean - wasn’t very well explained. The good news is that there are videos with the paper for the three case studies discussed in the paper. I’m having a little trouble getting them uploaded on the school terminal here, but once I get my computer up and running again (hopefully tomorrow), I’ll try to add those files in with this post. If you can’t wait, you can find the files via the above link, in the “supplements” section for this paper.
Chew, Elaine and Alexandre R. J. Francois. “Interactive Multi-scale Visualizations of Tonal Evolution in MuSA.RT Opus 2.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 16 pages.
Like the above paper, this one describes a specific visualization, specifically that used in the MuSA.RT program (whcih stands for “Music on the Spiral Array, Real-Time”). This visualization uses, oddly enough, a structure called the spiral array, which is another manner of modeling the proximity of tones to each other. As tones are played (via, say, a keyboard, again in MIDI format), the visualization changes in real-time, showing the path of the music and highlighting various tonal properties which, once again, I think I will understand better once I’ve got a sturdier foundation in music theory. All in all, though, this was a more useful paper than the previous one, because the concepts were explained much more clearly. It, too, includes videos for each of its three case studies (these case studies are done with the same three pieces of classical music as Toiviainen’s paper, so it might be enlightening to compare the two), and I’ll try to upload those in the next few days.
I’ve looked at material regarding the spiral array before. You can see some other material on the MuSA project here.
That’s what I’ve been able to recover thus far. I’m trying to track down a few other references I looked at a couple of weeks ago, but the above references have definitely been the most pertinent and helpful anyway. Things should run more smoothly again when I’ve got my own computer back on-line, especially if I can retrieve stuff from my old hard drive (which, by the way, if anyone knows how/has the stuff necessary to save data from a dead hard drive, I’d appreciate the help; I’ve backed up a lot of my important files elsewhere, but there’s still definitely stuff I’d rather not lose).
Meanwhile, I’ve also taken several more Second Life classes, mostly on Scripting, and I’m keeping an eye out for useful ones when I have the chance.
Total time worked since last post: Approx. 5 hours
Week 2 February 4, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , add a commentOkay, what to talk about…I guess I’ll start by reiterating some of what I mentioned during the meeting last Wednesday, since it hasn’t been mentioned here yet. I’ve read several papers (I found a good set of stuff of visualizations through the ACM Digital Library), and have several more waiting to be read. I’ve gotten some foundation for the topic of music visualization and I’ve started browsing in the specifics. Most of the projects I’ve read about so far have been for personal use, hypothetically, usually in something similar to iTunes. One of them was actually user-customizable, so not quite what I’m looking for. Still, there are some useful principles throughout.
As far as what I’ve done since the Wednesday meeting, that’s basically all been in Second Life. Which is not to say that’s a lot just yet. I spent a couple of hours last night getting things set-up so that I had an account and had at least an inkling of an idea what I was doing. I had a little trouble with the connection (I got kicked off of SL something like three times in two hours, and had to try several times to log on), but once I got on things ran okay. I’m on now, and have encountered no problems tonight.
I haven’t taken any classes yet, but I’ve taken a look at the offerings for the next week and noted the ones I can make, so I’ll be taking some classes over the course of the week (including in just a few minutes). I’ll have taken two by the meeting on Wednesday to meet my quota, and easily two more by next Wednesday, barring some sort of catastrophic SL meltdown.
Speaking of, I should probably get to that class. To whom it may concern, my SL login is Kopelo Faulkes.
-Brandon
EDIT: Oh, yeah, that whole hours-a-week thing. Counting tonight’s class, I’m at around 5 hours since the last post on the blog.