Now available on iPhone/iPad! Goto the App Store now!
Music painting imagines what music would look like if it were paintings and art. By mapping sound frequencies to light frequencies, sound is turned to color, as in some of my other projects. I have always loved painting, so now I have combined paint and sound!
Click the promo video to the left. iOS, Mac and Windows versions can be downloaded below:
This project follows on from my other sound visualisation related projects. To create an entirely new audio-visual experience, I have teamed up with friends and producers James Le Roux, Venaccio, Flights of Helios, and Haruna Fushimi to produce a virtual environment filled with minimal tech beats, spacey rock, upbeat melodies and heart-pounding trance.
Key advancements are the separation of synths, percussion, bass, kicks, FX and guitar tracks to produces more meaningful visualisation.
A unique "Orbital Mode" is used to give unprecedented observational and navigational control to the VR user, creating an experience impossible in reality.
The visualisation is essentially a graphical representation of the sound data, with time mapped to position, loudness to size and frequency to colour.
The user can pause the music and freeze the visualisation, so that they can look closely at the sound data from any angle like a freeze-motion shot out of The Matrix.
The demo shown here is essentially an expression of how we can map our senses in new ways for new media paradigms.
The full version of this video can be found at https://youtu.be/KB1j5i4CH4w
These photographs of liquid crystals were taken during PhD research undertaken at the University of Oxford in England. More information and photographs can be found at my liquid crystal flickr page here.
I have also put up my entire unsorted collection of liquid crystal photos from my research time, so that anyone can use them, for example, for textures for 3D objects, creatures and environments, art projects, illustrations, etc. Here is a demo of their use in 3D environments.
Please contact me if you would like to collaborate by using these photographs in your own projects.
A demo of the use of some of these pictures as textures in 3D environments.
As well as real-time sound visualisation for music and art, this project is also being explored within the context of virtual reality. A current research project is exploring how we can interact and collaborate in 3D virtual spaces through the mixed-sense modality of the realisation of our voices through sound, colour and space. Any visualisation process should be driven by an understanding of how humans perceive sound and light, and so here I combine data on human sensitivities to sound and light frequencies to generate an intuitive and natural synesthesia interaction between the user and herself and other users through technology mediated environments. Find out more at http://bensoundcolour.blogspot.jp/
With the announcement of Rez Infinitely to be released on Playstation VR, I thought I would take the opportunity to revisit my favourite track from the game. The visualisation showcases some of the latest features, including new hexagonal and rhombic 3D lattice structures, new colour mappings and a variety of particle textures including triangles, squared and hexagons. More information can be found at http://bensoundcolour.blogspot.jp/
Sound visualisation based on a natural algorithm for generating colour from sound spectra, taking into consideration an understanding of our visual and audial sensory systems. The new aspects of this visualisation are the use of a particle system to render the sound colour in a 3D way. The video demonstrates 3D lattice arrays arranged in simple cubic, body centred cubic, face centred cubic, and diamond lattice arrays, and also demonstrates a number of translations, rotations, sound-to-position coupling effects, changes in origin of sound colour projection and other effects.
Music is from Renick Bell, check him out at renickbell.net and at his SoundCloud soundcloud.com/renick
These images are made using a natural algorithm for turning pitch into colour, and are the visualisations of songs from a range of genres. The first image is 'simple things' by Massive Attack, for example, the second from Ott's amazing album Mir.
I designed the algorithm with human perception in mind. The sound is analysed using a Fourier transform, or FFT, which gives you the frequency spectrum of the sound over time. This spectrum is then mapped onto a visible spectrum, of light, and this spectrum is then multiplied by the sensitivities of the three light-cones in your eye. These sensitivity profiles were measured from volunteers in the 1930s, and from these sensitivities it is possible to determine what colour we would perceive, if the sound were actually light!
This technology is used to create real-time visualisations which I have used in a variety of contexts, including right now in research into interaction modalities in virtual reality environments. You can have a go now at looking at the colour of your own voice and music by downloading my free app on Android and iOS. Search "benjamin outram" in the app store, or follow the links below:
If you take some ink and a page, a brush and your mind, and an hour or two, that's all you need for a simple place to be calm and explore the creative space between your thoughts.
Playing with acrylic is fun isn't it? I like the way it feels and smells.
Some miscellaneous experiments mixing brush work and digital manipulation, photography, glitch, and technology.
These images show renderings of naturally beautiful lattice formations of spheres, generated using Unity3D and C#.
The images showcase simple cubic, face-centred cubic, body-centred cubic, diamond, rhombic and hexagonal lattices.
I created these lattices as a structure for rendering sound visualisation, you can see a video over on the sound visualisation page!
An exploration of beautiful lattice structures. These structures are found all over nature, in salt and diamonds and graphene.
Wouldn't it be cool if juggling balls could be tracked and the information used to create additional visualisation, for training, for gaming, for further analysis, for recording or for just about anything?? Well that what this project is all about.
I have also worked on a haptic device for virtual juggling.
There is more information available at the main blog on this project.
Why not look at it from above? That's what I thought one Sunday afternoon. I like juggling because it mixes attention, artistry, creativity, skill, motion, physics, topology, fluidity, dance, play, showmanship, exercise, and it crosses cultural, language and age barriers. Its also possible to integrate it with technology.
You can see more videos like this at my youtube channel:
The top is the height of the ball and the bottom is the x-axis! Cool eh? Juggling data was taken in real time using a nintendo wii remote. More information can be found at the blog on the project here:
Data visualised in Matlab after taken using the nintendo wii remote.
Liquid crystals exhibit beautiful textures that can provide a bizarre and out-of-this-world feel to 3D environments. All the textures shown in this demo are available here. Please use them in your own projects and let me know what you are doing!
The most beautiful images are showcased over on the liquid crystal page here.
A video demo from which the above screenshots were taken.
