AudioSculptures.com

News

10/1/09:

Two months later (after confirming my cat allergy and moving to my own place -- away from the 3 cats I lived with previously) I have stupendous amounts of energy, so I've been tracking some old friends down on Facebook, connecting with new people, and catching up with old friends.

On the software side of things, I've just finished updating Csound's website at Sourceforge.net and it's led to some interesting discussions with Dr.B (the synthesist professor at Berklee I bounce ideas off of) regarding the direction and future of AudioCarver and Csound. Pretty cool stuff if you're into that kind of thing, and it's really encouraging to know I've chosen such a great music program to base my audio sculpting software on, never mind the fact that it's free!

8/1/09:

While not directly related to audiosculptures, I've just received confirmation that my health problems (particularly my stomach issues) are indeed due to cat allergies, which is what I started to suspect 6 months ago (after trying to figure it out for 10 years). This is a huge discovery for me because I've been struggling with my health since childhood, never knowing something was wrong until my early 20's, and now the tests confirm that I am 8 times more allergic to cats than what is usually considered "very allergic". Apparently, living with cats my whole life led to my immune system making adjustments that were hiding the usual symptoms and causing the issues to hurt my stomach. Pretty amazing, in retrospect.

5/1/09:

I've finished my first stereo sculpture which is a new piece called "Tweet Sweet" that I sculpted in response to a "challenge" from Tobiah on the Csound forum.

This is my first sculpture done in stereo so I added panning capability to the sculpting program to fit the rules of the challenge. The resulting spread in the mix is really nice and is a great example of how some of the stereo capabilities in the new sculpting program can be used to great effect!

Putting this piece together has been a nice break from writing code and it's given me a bunch of new ideas regarding how to proceed with future development.

Here's some links to the audio for "Tweet Sweet" - Tweet-Sweet.mp3 - Tweet-Sweet.ogg

...and if you have Csound installed you can use the following link to compile the audio - Tweet-Sweet.csd

I haven't made a video of the Tweet-Sweet sculpture in action yet because it's quite a bit larger than the ones I've done before and it'll take a loooong time for it to render. I may setup a rendering run eventually, but for now it's audio-only with no accompanying 3d sculpture. Until then, here's a screen-capture video of AudioCarver in use while working on the first section of the piece.

4/15/09:

After a year of research and writing code using entirely new libraries, my new open-source audio sculpting program is starting to become useable! I am still it's only user, but the program is solid and relatively bug free so I'm hopeful others will be using it soon, too. "Deploy the first weapon of mass creation!", I say.

3/25/09:

The Khronos group announced yesterday that they will finally be standardizing 3d web-content, which is big news in the 3d world! Here is the press release.

What this means is that at some point in 2010 every major web browser will be able to display 3d content on the internet without the need for additional 3rd party plugins. The "experts" are predicting this will usher in an explosion of 3d content on the web, which is exactly what I've been preparing for! Very exciting!

3/15/09:

It has been brought to my attention that the new version of Octaga is doing extra compression on the already compressed mp3 files accompanying the x3d versions of the sculptures -- which is a big bummer and makes me glad I stopped making x3d worlds for it last year. Anyway, the video links for last year's sculptures are unaffected, so if you want to hear a better version of the audio I highly recommend using the video link instead of the x3d link on each one.

On the plus side -- some of the videos I uploaded to YouTube last year are automagically offering a "HD" (high-definition) version, which is cool. Apparently YouTube stores the original file uploaded and when they rolled out the "HD" button on their player they went back to the original files I uploaded and created high-def versions. Thanks YouTube!

7/10/08:

I've just returned from a very relaxing 4th of July trip/vacation to the Plymouth and Boston areas of Massachusetts in which I was able to get in contact with Dr. Boulanger at the Berklee Synthesis Dept. for a demo of the old AutoCAD plugin I've been using to make the audio sculptures. The timing of the meeting was pretty amazing considering the fact that I've now started using Csound as my primary synthesis language, which is one of the areas Dr.B has championed for years. I'd actually emailed him about setting up a demo last year when I was in the area, but he was very busy and didn't get back to me for almost 13 months, which coincidentally was when I was back in Boston again! Too funny.

Anyway, I wrote a new short piece for the demo that I'm calling "Particle Jet". I used the old AutoCAD plugin to make it since the new program is still in the research and design phase, but I updated it to use Csound as the audio compiler instead of my own (crappy) custom synth. The results are pretty impressive... Particle Jet Video. Let me know what you think.

6/7/08:

I've worked some midi file reading code into the sculpting program and I uploaded a few test videos of a bach fugue to YouTube if you want to check them out.

6/3/08:

Check this out... The Allosphere. One of the guys on the microtonal tuning forum told me about this building after seeing my sculptures. In a nutshell, the Allosphere is a huge sphere that immerses it's users in a 3d world projected onto its walls, kind of like the Holodeck on Star Trek "The Next Generation".

How fun would it be to sculpt audio using your bare hands on a huge Holodeck?!! (and who do I know at UC Santa Barbara that can get me into one of these? =)

4/18/08:

Michael Khramov, who I met on the microtonal tuning forums, has put together a montage of March's daily sculptures in the .wmv format which can be downloaded via the following link - 3dANSuite4Web2.wmv.

Michael has been following my 3d CAD related work because he's working out a plan to make "real" audio sculptures (as opposed to the "virtual" ones I make), which means he needs a scoring system that translates what is heard directly to what is seen. It's interesting, for sure, but much more limiting than just working with virtual scores. Check out Michael's Google Page to learn more... and if you really want your mind to be blown by advanced math as it relates to sound, check out Michael's Sonantometry Blog (warning: do not click this link if you fear algebra =)

3/31/08:

Whelp... I wasn't able to keep up with sculpting a new piece every day -- there's still just too much code to be written. I've also run into some limitations in the 3d browsers currently available that are making it too processor intensive to experience the sculptures as I've imagined them. So anyway, it's back to the drawing board.

My current plans are to make a stand-alone open-source version of the AutoCAD plugin I've been working on, and from my research into the available open-source code libraries, an open-source version of all my future tools seems to be within reach! Regardless, the "daily sculptures" that I've been putting together this past month will most likely be the last ones I write with the AutoCAD plugin, which should save me a ton of money and make my virtual sculpting tools available to a much larger user-base. It's a big step in what seems like the wrong direction, but I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run.

3/1/08:

I've been researching the x3d file format (the successor to the vrml file format) for the past few months and playing around with it, and I've put together a tool-chain that enables me to bring the sculptures I've been creating in AutoCAD into a virtual 3d world that people can navigate through -- much like they would in a video game! I'm going to be writing a new piece every day and putting the tool-chain's code through it's paces to see how it holds up... stay tuned.