Just finished finals last week, so I wasn't in a position to churn out anything very creative. I'll just let you know what's in the works.
I tried to upload a video of my second project for music class, but ripping a dvd into avi takes more skill than sb had time to learn this week. It's too bad: the project consisted of me playing the tuba, Ricardo playing the electric guitar, Stephen playing the midi keyboard, Cameron manning the computer, and Henrik 'playing' the wiimote. The wiimote was hooked up to some special graphical and particle effects using PD's Gem. It was a spectacle.
Speaking of Cameron, his final project for the class is on youtube, music thing, and gizmodo. Props to him for that. Where's my project? I didn't get to perform it due to technical difficulties. Transferring my patch from Max4.5 on PC to Max5 on Mac turns out to be pretty near impossible. (remind me to rant about how much I dislike Max/MSP later)
Our video game Stage IV is complete and the showcase went well. As soon as they put it online I'll post a link so you guys can check it out. I just had a tuba recital last week, and we (hopefully) got that on tape, so I'll be looking into that as well.
Looks like I didn't get a midi keyboard controller for my birthday, so I'm gonna have to purchase one myself for the summer. If anyone has one they love, let me know about it (I'd rather not spend more than $200)
19.5.08
Nothing New to Report
10.5.08
Numerical Analysis Renders
End of the year projects are coming and going. This one in particular is for my numerical analysis class. Here we use ODE solvers to guesstimate where particles will end up in a vector field. That's boring, but the results are very pretty pictures
Oh, and here's our particle video, made in Matlab ^__^
ODE Particles from esbie on Vimeo.
4.5.08
Melodyne: I'm not Impressed
When I first saw Melodyne, I had the same reaction that I had towards Guitar Hero: an emotional one...almost a little offended even. DDR doesn't make you a dancer, and Guitar Hero doesn't make you a rockstar (also: being a rockstar doesn't make you a musician).
If you haven't seen Melodyne, you should check it out now. Melodyne decomposes any audio file into distinct voices using Fast Fourier Transform (fft) analysis. You can then use their editor to distort these voices in any way you choose. The most popular transformation? Auto-tune.
Let me explain why I don't like Melodyne.
The Hype: people are hailing this as a new technological breakthrough that will speed us into the new age of amazingness. Let me inform you that fft has been around for decades. People are entranced that Melodyne can pick out individual instruments from the mix, but that's not very mind-blowing, considering each instrument has it's own unique timbre and wave structure. Melodyne can't distinguish between two of the same instrument, as we might expect (Sorry folks, we haven't taught the computer any counterpoint yet).
The Abuse: people are going to use Melodyne extensively and explicitly for autotune. Listen, if you can't sing on key, there are other ways to fix that... like singing lessons. FFT will produce artifacts, no matter how good the software is. Visit my tumblelog for examples of blatant autotuning.
What do I think is awesome about Melodyne? The interface gives musicians leverage. Cubase is to Audacity as Melodyne is to Spear. Spear is a dead simple fft decomposition and resynthesis software. Everything you can do in Melodyne you can already do in Spear (Spear is also free, like Audacity). It's the interface that can really make this software powerful.
What else do I like? Since I'm into the world of electronic music, I plan to exploit Melodyne in a different way... by exaggerating its artifacts or transforming audio samples into something completely unrecognizable, not by pretending that I can sing.
