OpenLab Goodness

Posted on 30/04/2009 by hellocatfood

Last Saturday I went down to London to attend OpenLab 5:

Openlab are providing a day of workshops & presentations about opensource software, and performances in the evening at Cafe OTO, Dalston. There is a venerable lineup of OpenLab members providing some in depth knowledge during the day and some great performances at night.

The workshops I were looking forward to most were the ones that involved Pure:Data and Processing. I’ve messed around with both of those programs before but I’ve only ever just edited the example files. That is until after some of the workshops:

That was a snippet of work by Daniel Jones. It combined Supercollider and Processing and a camera to convert images into sound, which is something I’ve wanted to accomplish for a long time.

In another of the workshops I was introduced to the basics of Processing, which reminds me a lot of my days coding in ActionScript. Once I’ve studied the Processing book (thanks Charlie!) and learnt how to manipulate SVG’s I’ll be back on track with my coding artworks! You can download what I did that day if you’re curious about Processing yourself.

Bleepy Noises

Posted on 20/04/2009 by hellocatfood

Whilst Nikki and Pete have been hacking their toys and gadgets to make all manner of noises I’ve gone the soldering-free option by making sweet noise on my laptop in Pure:Data. This originally started in the hack session at the Linux Emporium as an attempt to make a sort of theme tune for the hack space. By the end of the day I’d accomplished making fart-like noises that mess up your head a bit. At the next hack session I’d progressed a little bit further and made my farty noises a little bit more controllable with the use of sliders and buttons.

I want to progress my little fart-machine and make the random noises keyboard controllable and eventually have a sort of ambient fart-noise generator that actually sounds tuneful. As long as you have Pure Data installed you can download what I did and try it for yourself.

Clicky here to download

Whilst you’re at it join the mailing list 😉