Created by Diana Lange is this little sound experiment using Processing. Each circle stands for a certain position in the audio’s FFT data. Libraries used include PeasyCam / Camera, OpenGL / Rendering, Sonia / FFT, Beads / Beat detection and Minim / Waveform.

More work by Diana: diana-lange.de

Music: Sigur Rós – Glósóli

Cinemetrics is the thesis project of Frederic Brodbeck‘s at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Den Haag. It aims to create a visual “fingerprint” for film using the editing structure, color, speech and motion. Different characteristics are analysed using python and openCV, and data visualised using a custom Processing application. This allows films to be interpreted or compared side by side.

Being someone who really enjoys movies and cinema, I always notice little things about the style of a movie, so film and its characteristics were an interesting starting point for this project. Furthermore my thesis is about generative / computational design and what role writing code plays regarding new approaches in (graphic) design. It was clear that for my graduation project I would use the methods I described in the thesis and that it would involve a certain amount of programming in order to visualize data. However, today there are already a lot of information graphics using meta-data related to film and cinema (budget, box office data, awards won, relationship between characters etc.). That’s why I wanted to use the movie itself as a source of data, to see what sort of information can be extracted from it, to find ways of visualizing it and to create the necessary tools to do this.

Tools for disassembling video files into their components (video, audio, subtitles, etc.) and processing them (shot detection, average shot length, motion measuring, color palettes), as well as an interactive application to generate and compare different movie fingerprints are all available as code here.

To accompany the analysis, poster series show the most important steps of the process. They explains where the data comes from and what techniques have been used.

Project Page

Frederic Brodbeck is graphic designer and creative coder. Recently graduated from the Graphic Design department at the KABK

Boris Müller has been creating visual theme for the Poetry on the Road festival since 2002. While the theme itself is changing, the underlying idea for the visuals is always the same: All graphics are generated by a computer program that turns texts into images. Below are two of the identities, created in the last two years. To see them all, click here.

The design and the development process are a collaboration with the design agency jung und pfeffer. (Nowone/one)

The concept for 2009 is just a combination of a Treemap visualization algorithm and a Code128B bar code generator. All poems of the literature festival are broken up into single words. Then, the frequency of each word is calculated. Each word is represented as a rectangle, which corresponds to the frequency of the word. Finally, the single word is encoded as a barcode, which fills the according rectangle. So it is possible to decrypt the poster using an appropriate bar code scanner. {You can use a bar code reader on a mobile phone for »decoding« parts of the key visual.}

Launch Poetry 09 interactive

The metaphoric theme of this years Poetry on the Road visual is a mad origami master. Every poem is represented as a data sculpture made from virtual paper. So this year, we don’t have a single key visual but a sequence of individual graphics that represent a single poem. This is also reflected on the design level – a number of poster variations were produced for the festival. The concept in a nutshell: a long paper strip that is folded in an extremely complex manner. Every ridge represents a word. Depending on the length and frequency of the word, the form of the ridge changes. The virtual paper is then folded between the ridges. So the defining visual element are actually not the words – but the space between words.

Poetry ’10

Soundcloud +TV is a visualizer for Soundcloud, a popular online music sharing site.

Watch and listen to any Soundcloud user’s music in 3D. Built in Fash with Papervision 3D.

Created by ssgrfk

play SOUNDCLOUD+TV

(via @P45C4L)

Grid is an open source visual synthesiser application designed for rhythmic, melodic, or textural applications. An exploration in frequency of sound and how it may be visualised. Developer description:

But has joy gone blind? No; there are primary colors in sound. There are primitives to sound, to the psychological constituents of sound; though there is a one to one correspondence between frequency and the reals, frequency is a property rather than a depiction of palpable tone. In this sense, the algorithm used is structurally formative rather than exhaustively descriptive of the sounds produced.

You can download the code (xcode project) here.

You may also enjoy PASY02 [iPhone]

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $3.99
Developer: Kin

UPDATE 19.02.2010: 5 promocodes up for grabs! Leave a comment below and we’ll pick winners by random later today. Thanks Kin!

Created by Feedtank, Transpose is an audiovisual performance instrument devised to encourages physical movement in electronic music performances. In Transpose, the performer’s silhouette is projected in front of them along with noteboxes, which produce a sound when touched. The performer can change between instruments and record loops that can be turned on or off to create layered compositions.

In May 2008, Feedtank collaborated with musician Shelley Burgon to produce a performance using the instrument, at the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium as a part of its Edison Media Project series.

Founded in 2004 by Jonah Warren and Steven Sanborn, Feedtank is a small interactive studio specializing in the creation of playful interactive experiences. It’s constantly experimenting with new technologies, coming up with ideas, and creating prototypes. Feedtank’s goal is to create experiences that allow people to interact with technology in new ways, making it more human, approachable, and fun.

(Thanks Jonah)

Created by Marble Cake , Ants Clock gathers more than a hundred people, as small as ants, together to display the time and date. As the time changes some leave, new ones join.

Don’t have an iPhone? Get the Mac OSX Dashboard widget here.

See also the beautiful Ningen Calc X (itunes link)

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $0.99
Developer: Marble Cake

Rhizomatiks continue to expand their free Clock.app offering in the AppStore with the latest addition of Clock11 and Clock12. Appropriately themed and released right on time, Clock 12 shows time from the falling snow. Clock11 is a collection of spinning discs each one showing hours, minutes and seconds. Video below shows clocks 1-6.

All the clocks were made using openFrameworks.

See the full collection here. Read about Clocks 1-6 on CAN.

Clock11

Clock12

Latest project by Kim Asendorf that has been developing over time if you have been following his flickr, is a visual exploration and visualization of spam collected ever since 2006 in his ongoing Spam Catalog project.

Graphically kept as simple as possible, Spam Visualization explores how the visualization diagrams can commute between information and aesthetic. Included visualizations are; quantityGrid, wordScore, toplevelCircle, ipQuadrangle, timeTable and BasicShare.

You can explore them all now by visiting spamvisualization.net

Eyebrowse is an add-on for firefox and a webapp brought to you by MIT CSAIL that lets you easily record, visualize, and share your trails through the web in real-time. Tell eyebrowse what sites to track, browse away and compare. Eeyebrowse also lets you find out what’s hot, who’s reading what, and how you surfing changes over time.

Currently, most web browsing data is collected by search engine companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Alexa), which is hardly available for public domain research. Eyebrowse seeks to fill this gap by providing an open and public repository of “web trails”. By making this data openly available, the project hopes to support the creation of useful public services that report major trends on the web, services that support personalization through collaborative filtering, and other as-yet unimagined services that require a mass of data about the world’s interaction with the web. (via infosthetics)

Check out the eyebrowse pulse and some real live profiles. Unfortunately, I am a Safari user although I do have my bookmarks all synced up thanks to xmarks I rarely use Firefox. Nevertheless, you can also look up any site and see who visits, when they visit, where they come from and where they click on. It should also give you an insight in what information google may hold on you already.

eyebrowse