CatSynth

Well, the visitor counter passed 15000 sometime after 9PM tonight.

And the winner is…well, it looks like it might be a tie (possibly a three-way tie). I'll announce names once I've successfully contacted and verified everyone.

How could there possibly be a tie for the 15000th visitor, you ask? Well, it looks like the counter might have a bit of an issue, especially for sites with a fair amount of traffic. I run a version of sphpblog, slightly tuned and modified for my own needs/interests. Indeed, that's how I was able to program in the “contest” to declare a winner when the counter hit 15000. However, the counter seems to have stayed at 15000 over three visits from three unique IP addresses, which resulted in a “tie.”

I have gone through the site logs to verify this; and I will honor the prize for each of the people who can legitimately claim to have “won.”

As for the counter, I will either have to write my own to replace the current one, or use one of those outside services. It looks like the total visits for CatSynth may have been severely undercounted because of this, and I might try some simple statistics to get a better estimate. Note that this only affects the internal site counter, not any of the outside services, like “Top 100s”, or ads.

Certainly a reminder to question the reliability of some other electronic counters out there:

stats 15000 visitors award contest

I needed some intellectual diversions over the last couple of days, and last night I took another look at concept of software art that has intruiged me recently.

Fluxus is a system for live software art that combines programming with audio, visual and interactive elements. It comes to us from the same people who made Quagmire, in which programs ran inside of monochrome images.

Some interesting statements from the Fluxus website:

act of a flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream; a continuous succession of changes

On a more technical level:

Fluxus reads live audio or OSC network messages which can be used as a source of animation data for realtime performances or installations. Keyboard or mouse input can also be read for simple games development, and a physics engine is included for realtime simulations of rigid body dynamics.

The use of OSC is of particular interest, as such a system becomes an interesting companion to Open Sound World. It also rekindles my idea of providing an OSC-based livecoding environment for OSW.

Unforunately, I have had some difficulty getting it installed (or compiled) for Mac OSX, so I haven't been able to do much myself. Hopefully I will be able to get that working soon…

fluxus software art livecoding osc

No, not that quagmire!

Rather, I am talking about an interesting software art project in which programs exist within a bitmap. From the author:

Quagmire is an emulation of an impossible 8bit processor, where all memory is addressed in 2 dimensions, and is represented by pixel value. Program execution threads can run up, down, left or right. Sections of code are visible in memory, as are the processes as they run. Unlike a normal computer the internal process of the machine is visible. Programs are drawings.

The programs are executed by scanning pixels in the bitmap/drawing and interpreting them as instructions that can change the original bitmap, including the parts that are being “run.”

The best way to illustrate this concept is will an illustration, or rather, a series of illustrations:

In the above example, the “program” in the lower-left corner switches various pixels on and off, and spawns more copies of itself in the process. After running for a while, one ends up with four animated “stripes” of execution.

The program changes dramatically if the “non-executed” area of the image is different. For example, we can paste my “digital fish” logo onto the image and then run the program again:

The very orderly execution over the empty image becomes much more complex in the presence of the fish logo.

Although the complex changes in the image can seem random, they are completely deterministic. Running the same program/image in Quagmire yields the same result every time. Indeed, this can be seen as an example of chaos in which simple processes can produce incredibly complex results that may seem random but are completely deterministic.

Some images produce less complexity. Applying the same program to a picture of Space Ghost (who has appeared in several posts on this forum recently) causes a small number of changes after which the program comes to a halt:

By contrast, applying the program code to an image of Luna appears to grow ever more noisy and complex:

The Quagmire site has more detailed technical information about the programming language (more of a machine language) and an implementation in which you can run your own programs. You can also find links to more examples of “software art.”

It would be interesting to explore software art that uses audio in addition to (or instead of) visual images…

quagmire
software art

I have been experimenting lately with alternate tunings and scales. A couple that have particularly piqued my interest are the Bohlen-Pierce scale and the much-less-used Bohlen 833 cents scale. The latter is intriguing in that it is based on properties of the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio (although Bohlen admits he did not have those concepts in mind when he stumbled upon this scale).

Based on the golden ratio (1.618034…), one can construct a harmonic series as multiples of 833 cents that has a very distinct timbre. This can be easily implemented in Emulator X as a series of sinewave voices (or voices of any other harmonic single-wave sample) tuned multiples of 833 cents above the fundamental:

The series above consists of a fundamental, three golden-ratio harmonics, followed by the octave above the fundamental (traditional first harmonic 2:1 ratio), and the three-golden-ratio sub-harmonics of the octave.

Using these and other harmonics, Bohlen was able to construct the following seven-step scale between the tonic and the tone 833 above.

Emulator X does not have editable tuning tables, although it does have a 36ET tuning (36 divisions of the octave). Bohlen suggests that playing specific steps out of the 36ET scale yields a good appoximation of the 833 scale:

Combining the Bohlen 833 scale and harmonic series, which are both based on the golden ratio yields a new tonality. Although it is quite different from the traditional Western tonality based on integer ratios, it is nonetheless “harmonic” with respect to its own overtone series. This is perhaps a simple counter-example to to the Monk's Musical Musings from an earlier article.

But how does it sound? To that end, I provide the following audio example consisting of the scale played on the 833-timbre in Emulator X, along with some additional intervals. Because this is only an approximation using 36ET, things aren't perfectly “harmonic,” but I think one can get a feel for the tonality. I particularly like the “tri-tone” (600 cents above fundamental) here.

The next steps are to come up with a more musical timbre based on the harmonic series, as well as short composition using the scale…

music
harmony
tuning
scale
bohlen
emulator x