Literary License Blog

Generative Star Trails Animation

November 15, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Music

For my final for Code of Music, I have decided to change projects and create a generative version of my Star Trails Music Visualization.

While I was living in San Francisco, I frequented a local grassroots music and arts space (Red Poppy Art House) and one day, one of the artists tied to the space, Meklit Hadero, played a few songs on her guitar that used recordings of stars by Nasa’s Kepler Mission for the sound. The star sound recordings are provided freely by Nasa, and I am intrigued by the idea of using them for the generative melody for my Star Trails animation. The star sounds are droney and strange and I think it would be interesting to filter and distort them and create a beautiful and eerie soundscape. Not sure yet if the ocean landscape should also have its own sound tied somehow to data/sonification as well (perhaps I will distort ocean recordings in keeping with the theme!)

I am also interested in recreating the Star Trails animation in 3D and using one of the example three.js particle wave sketches for the ocean. I like the idea of allowing the user an ability to navigate and explore the animation in 3D, or possibly having the generated music change the camera position and the lights. That said, I definitely need to put aside some time this week to dig into the tone.js examples and API in order to understand the library.

Some interesting data sonification projects:

Listen to Wikipedia
Financial Crisis Sonified
London Sound Survey Map
Sonic Water

Programming Color – Hue, Saturation and Brightness

October 26, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Music

Successfully set up my Star Trails music visualization to use Hue, Saturation and Brightness as the color parameters.

I am mapping the hue of the stars to a small range (shades of blues) and to vary with changes in frequency values (low, mid and high notes). Color saturation is lower in the beginning so as the “stars” are painted across the sky, the color builds over the duration of the sketch. The saturation and brightness of the colors is also mapped to changes in the volume (when the song is louder, the stars that are drawn are brighter and more vivid in color).

The diameter of the stars also changes according to the frequency spectrum. I am also mapping the stars’ “speed” to the frequency spectrum, which means that rather than having the stars continuously draw a line, there are larger jumps and gaps in the line and moments where the stars are painted in a previous position. The result is non-continuous lines and a more spontaneous and organic look to the piece.

The initial idea of the sketch was to have the stars draw circles which would be completed at the end of the song. The result was very crowded and too perfect. Allowing the music to influence the way the stars are painted across the sky results in more organic variation and results in a musical interpretation of star trail photography.

Sticking to a monochrome color scheme (shades of blue) seems fitting given the relaxing and meditative nature of the sketch. This also creates a harmonious look to the piece, with ocean and sky reading as being part of one sketch. The color of the ocean lines also varies according to changes in the volume, while the range of possible hues is in the blue/purple family. It’s also fun to let the ocean lines be mapped to greater values and more visibly see the resulting change of volume, although it doesn’t work with the meditative quality of the sketch.

Feeling very close to a finished look and feel! Am interested in trying to map the color variables to more than one visual element (for instance, alpha values mapped to both the y and x axis) and continuing to explore what the code is capable of doing.

Code of Music – Final Project Proposal

October 22, 2014 by michellechandra in Music

Coral Sculpture / Sequencer

October 3, 2014 by michellechandra in Digital Fabrication, Music

While attending the Eyeo Festival over the summer, I saw a talk by Micah Scott in which she showed various projects including a desktop light sculpture she built using acrylic and LEDs.

Triangle Attractor by Micah Scott

Inspired by Micah’s project, I decided to build a light sculpture for our first assignment in Digital Fabrication. However, I wasn’t crazy about the geometric rigidity of Micah’s sculpture, and felt a more organic form (cellular in nature) using a mixture of materials (both wood and plexi) could be an interesting derivative.

Something closer in feel to this!

While researching natural patterns and forms, I became fascinated by the many modular and repetitive patterns found in coral. → Read more

CitiBikeHoods – Visualizing Usage Patterns of the CitiBike System

September 30, 2014 by michellechandra in Cloudcommuting

For the Cloud Commuting Midterm, Jiwon, Haylee and I analyzed CitiBike in order to identify communities of stations based on number of trips between stations. By analyzing bike trips between stations, would we discover a pattern of stations connected to each other due to a high volume of trips between them, and what would this pattern reveal about current usage of the CitiBike system?

To identify “CitiBikeHoods”, we wrote a Python program to calculate number of bike trips between stations from August 2014 (the most recent data available to us.) Thanks to Salem Al-Mansoori for helping us write this program (code at end of post!)

Once we had our data, we imported to Gephi, which is a software program which created a Network Graph of the stations and identified communities of stations. Initially, we were hoping to write a program using a Python module called NetworkX in order to create the network graph (allows for more control in generating graph and identifying communities from the data), but we had trouble writing the program so opted to use Gephi.

The tricky part of importing our data to Gephi was giving the data to Gephi in a format Gephi liked. We had to rename our Origin Station and Destination Station columns (our nodes), “Source” and “Target” and the column containing the number of bike trips between the stations we renamed “Edge” since it would be the weight of the line connecting our nodes (stations!) We used a Network Graph to identify relationships between stations by grouping them into modules or “hoods.”

In the above graph, the outer yellow nodes are Brooklyn stations, the stations in the center are located in Lower Manhattan, the green stations are Midtown stations, the lower purple stations are Lower East Side/East Village while the upper purple stations are Murray Hill/FlatIron.

We then exported this data from Gephi in order to create a map using Mapbox to color in the stations according to the community the station belonged to. We chose to go with 63 communities but it might be better in the future to have less communities. View the code here. (Thanks to Adarsh Kosaru for helping us write code to color in our different communities with a randomly generated color in MapBox!)

What was immediately obvious in the mapping of communities was that Midtown is treated as one neighborhood, along with Brooklyn and Lower East Side, while other groupings of stations appeared to be random. In order to better understand the CitiBikeHoods, we compared to other maps of New York City. → Read more

Star Trails Music Visualization – Color Theory

September 29, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Music

Last step before finishing my Star Trails music visualization is getting the colors right. First step in experimenting has been moving away from the RGB color space and thinking in terms of Hue, Saturation and Brightness.

Low frequency values mapped to center, higher values mapped to outer edge

The challenge is in understanding how the music data is affecting the color mapping. Right now, I have only been able to create a monochrome looking sky, when I would rather have more variation in colors. Part of the reason for the monochrome look at present is that the frequency values are mapped to the x axis so that low frequency values are nested in the center and get higher as move outward. Each star represents a different frequency value (low, mid, high). It might be better though to randomly draw the different values in order to result in a more varying sky. It is also possible that because the song being visualized does not change so much, there is less visual variation.

I need to get in the habit of console logging my sketch to make sense of what is going on. Once the colors are closer to where I want them to be for the sky, I will map colors for the landscape lines as well. Right now, the landscape and sky read as two separate visuals rather than being part of the same sketch.

This project has been an ongoing enormous endeavor but thankfully, the visual look of its has vastly improved over the past week now that I am experimenting with hue, saturation, and brightness!

Code of Music – Usability Principles

September 29, 2014 by michellechandra in Music

How can I turn my Star Trails music visualization into an interactive landscape a user could play? One starting point is to look to Don Norman’s usability principles in The Design of Everyday Things:

*Visibility* – Things must be visible, correct mapping between intended action and operation

The visuals of the landscape will indicate interactivity
An overlay message before the interaction starts hints at this: “Play the universe.” Maybe ask the user to choose starting scale for visualization.
The landscape could be designed to look like the strings of a musical instrument. The lines should already be moving and generating tones
The landscape will drawn moving to the right, and the window the viewer looks through also moves to the right in order to draw a new scene that changes to the music suggesting a dynamic scene not to be passively watched.
If the user moves the mouse over the scene, tones are generated and the visuals change color to indicate interactivity
Some visuals spin and move more aggressively to hint at user interaction

*Affordances* - Clues to the operations of things

Shape of the visual should mimic real world interactivity. For example, a circular visual object can be “spun” by the user. Button like visuals can be pushed on and off. String like objects can be pulled. Etc.

Conceptual Models – Ideas we already have in place about how things should work based on look, culture, etc.

Playing a visual landscape is an abstract idea, not rooted in the real world. The visuals should hint at musical interactivity by resembling elements of musical instruments that can be played like strings or piano keys.
Visual elements should resemble real world objects with same mapping (i.e. button like visual should be pushed)

Feedback – Give user confirmation that action caused result

Clear change in tone generation if user interacts with visual elements on page with mouse
If user moves mouse over visuals, tones should be generated or colors change to indicate the elements are interactive and encourage user to play with the interactivity
Correct interaction should reward user by dramatically changing the music and visuals

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