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EDIT: I have some newer, better webcam audio visualizers and some utility patches available now. Click Here: http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/quartz-composer-downloads/
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For all of you who have asked for this, I’ve made my Artomatic Quartz Composer based webcam audio visualizer available as a free download.(Keep in mind, this is only for Mac OS X users – Quartz isn’t portable).
You can download it here: http://jackwhitsitt.com/Artomatic09-final-whitsitt.zip
(Im calling it “WAVIQ” for short…Webcam Audio Visualizer In Quartz”…since it needs some sort of a name and I dont feel that creative about it.)
A quick overview:
The composition has two inputs – the webcam and an audio source. If you have a built in webcam, it will default to that. Likewise, if you have a built in mic (most laptops do), the composition will default to using that as your audio source. You can change these by going into the patch inspector for the Video and Audio patches and selecting “settings”. (In the case of the audi, double-click the macro patch “Audio Source” and then click on “Audio Input” to get there).
The only other settings you’ll be interested in are the Increasing Scale and Decreasing Scale parameters found in the Audio Input patch. These affect how fast the values for movement, color, etc. get bigger and how fast they get smaller. This will affect how the composition responds to different music. Also, keep in mind that in the audio settings of OS X itself, you can change the mic sensitivity. This will affect how the composition responds as well.
You can also find a basic tutorial to get you started on tweaking this in the links below.
Thats it. Drop me a line with any questions and have fun with it. If you do end up using it, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks!
Jack
- Tutorial I wrote explaining the basics of how this works:
- Stop-Motion Video Example of how I’m using it at Artomatic:
- Screen-shots of my Artomatic Art Installation:
Histogram of major words in the US Stimulus Bill. Big Grey blob in the second "mountain peak" from the left represents "Health" in the Bill. You can see it takes a disproportionate place in everything.
Originally uploaded by sintixerr
This is a follow-up to a previous post and is philosophically related to this post.
On the subject of these “data visualizations as art”, I’ve been trying to better articulate why I think they’re art and how I’m trying to evolve my process.
What it comes down to is that there seems to be two pieces to developing the visualizations:
- Choosing the right structure and things to measure about the text or data…what makes sense to compare to what. How do you reduce the noise and non-dependent variables? Each type of text you’re measuring and each circumstance has different relationships. There is a lot of science to this part, but it’s not completely predicatable. There is art.
- How do you visually best enhance and needle out the important details, contrast between points, etc so that they can be “seen” in the noise that doesnt matter? This is all art. Understanding how color, shape, contrast, etc all work together and how to use all of those to present a dense amount of information without being overwhelming is tricky and depends on the skill of the one creating it…
It’s my belief that playing to what we understand as people’s abilities to process and comprehend aesthetics in art involves exactly the same techniques and takes advantage of the same aspects of peoples brains/senses as good visual data analysis. So, if you’re doing data analysis, you start out figuring out #1, and then move to #2 based on #1.
What I was trying to do with these stimulus images – and the last of my security visualizations – was start out with concepts of what I’d like for #2 (how they would “feel”) and then figure out what I needed to do in #1 (massage the data) to get there…while still remaining true to the underlying information.
Next up (and once I learn more Objective C), I’m going to try and read in the stimulus bill to Quartz Composer and combine my recent interactive/music visualizations with the Bill. We’ll see if that goes anywhere interesting. :)
Also, Artomatic returns to DC this year. I very well may be displaying this stuff there when it comes around. This or the music/webcam visualizations.
Today, after the 8 hour “Industrial Control Systems Security for IT Professionals class”, I wanted to make something pretty. And code. And work on a protocol problem. I’ve needed to look a little at the new Stimulus bill for work lately, so I thought I’d try and at least say I’d written Python today, dissect the text of the bill into parsable chunks, then throw it into some visualizations. I can’t easily capture the interesting avenues of analysis I was pursuing visually (and I dont feel like writing it up), but I did manage to make some kind of pretty pictures. Hopefully someone feels inspired from them and goes down a similar path. (I already have some ideas at further stats I want to parse from the bill to be able to look at it more meaningfully. Perhaps Ill do it this weekend – this was just the first cut at setting it up.)
First, I grabbed the full text of the bill from HERE. Then, I wrote some (stupidly) simple python (again, I’m never sure if it’s -good- python) to parse the bill and turn it into a new file with five columns: Word Number, Word Length, Line Number, Work Position in Line, and the actual Word itself. This essentially turned the bill into a a text file with every word in the bill on its own line (in the order it showed up), but with machine readable meta-data I could use to visually represent it.
stimulus = open(‘/Users/sintixerr/Documents/stimulus.txt’, ‘r’)
finalfile = open(‘/Users/sintixerr/Documents/sdump.txt’, ‘w’)
linenum=0
wordnum=0
lineposition=0
gstruct=[]
for line in stimulus:lineposition=0
linenum+=1
word=line.split(‘ ‘)
word=word[:len(word)-1]
for w in word:
lineposition+=1
wordnum+=1
gstruct=str(wordnum)+’\t’+str(linenum)+’\t’+str(lineposition)+’\t’+w.upper()+’\t’+str(len(w))+’\n’
finalfile.write(gstruct)
stimulus.close()
finalfile.close()
Then, I opened up the new tab delimited bill in my visualizer of choice and ran it through a few different ways of representing the bill.
First, the raw text – without any real manipulation – looked cool in and of itself and I noticed some interesting, if obvious in hindsight, features. (I did clean out some obviously bad data first with a little sed action, but that mostly just involved removing punctuation that caused the same words to show up as different ones. )
Stimulus Bill Visualized in its Entirety. In this image, the Y axis represents every word (ASCII characters with spaces or carriage returns on either side) in the bill and the X axis represents the Line Numbers those words appeared on.
First, if you look about a fourth of the way from the left, and then again closer to halfway, you see a vertical “break” in the scatterplot where it looks like the density is much lower. That is probably a major section break in the original document (I honestly haven’t actually read it in english yet). That possibility is supported by the second observation which is: Even in human written documents, you can still discern protocol visually. (Again, obvious, but it’s neat.). If you look at the bottom third of the image, it looks nothing like the top 2/3. Much more curving paths, fewer horizontal lines, less density, etc. If you look at those “words”, they’re all document structure words (like section numbers, headings, etc.). …and monetary figures. If you look closely, there appear at first glance to be two or more incompatible or unrelated document content structures there. Above that section is where the more obvious “free form” english exists in the set.
Moving on from there, I wanted to see if I could get anything intellectually or aesthetically interesting by using a scatterplot to draw out the shape of the bill. To do that, I plotted “Line Number” on the X axis and “Position of Word in the Line” on the Y axis. (Actually, originally those two were swapped, but the resulting image “looked better” when I swapped the X and Y). I colored everything by Word on a categorical scale so things wouldn’t blend together too much and then ratcheted up the size scale to reduce empty space. I was looking for a visual representation of the literal structure of the document, not an analysis tool or I wouldn’t have done that last bit.
The resulting image looks like this:
Shape of the Stimulus Bill on its side. If you were to compress the actual text of the whole bill into one page and rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, it would probably have the same shape as this, only with text.
Finally, I was curious if I could do a little manual clustering work. I tried to narrow down the words into the data set to those that might have some intrinsic meaning in the context of the stimulus bill. This means I got rid of prepositions, repeated filler words, etc. I did this by knocking out every word under 4 letters and all of those over 17 chars (over 17 were all artifacts of turning the bill into something parsable, not actual real words). Then I created a bar chart of words and sorted it by how often words appeared in the document and removed about the bottom 70% of words. I made an assumption (which is almost definitely so broad that the data will have to be sliced again a different way for meaningful analysis) that any words that weren’t repeated that often just werent a real “theme” to the people writing the document. Interestingly, things like “security” and “health” and some others were left in the set, but “cyber” was removed. Hmm. :) After that, I went manually through the remaining set of words and removed those that seemed to not have any cluster value (both through intuition as well as by visually watching the scatterplot of the whole set while I highlighted individual words t see what lit up.) Finally, and lastly, since I originally wanted to make visually interesting things more than do real analysis, I used some blurring, resharpening, and layering to give a more cloudy, vibrant feeling to it. Interestingly, that created “clouds” around many of the clusters and made them easier to make out for analysis. That supports my whole theory that what the eyes and mind like to look at is what the mind and eyes are better able to make intelligent use of.
The final result is here:
Words of substance that might be indicative of topics or subjects within the bill. X axis, like the first picture, is line number and Y axis is Word.
(Second Update: As of 9/14/2009, I’m working for Idaho National Laboratory (INL) liaisoning to DHS in DC supporting their ICS-CERT effort. This is reflected in the online resume, but not yet the pdf.)
Just a pinging post since I’ve just (finally) updated my resume on this site and elsewhere to reflect what Im currently doing at TSA. Apparently, IDS analysts in this area are in hot demand, but that’s not really what I do any more. Unfortunately, what I -do- do isn’t as easy to tokenize/categorize as something like that. I do love it, though :) I like…making stuff work better than it did before and do new things. People, in particular.
Here’s a link to the PDF:
http://jackwhitsitt.com/whitsittresume02092009b.pdf
And online:
http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/jack-whitsitts-technical-and-security-resume/
Update: You can now download a Webcam Audio Visualizer based on the one references in this tutorial – and some completely new ones – by clicking HERE
INTRO
So I’ve been making some new art lately that I think pretty is cool. Back at Artomatic last year, I wrote code that generated a mosaic of one image out of another and make a 6′x6′ photo and wondered if the code was art, since the only thing it did was generate that one mosaic?
At that point, though, it was still static and the question was (to me) relatively easy to answer.
This time, I wanted something more dynamic and interactive. I wanted to further explore the question of whether or not something that changes every time you see it and which depends on its environment is still “art”. What I ended up doing is using Apple’s Quartz Composer – a visual media programming language – to create an “audio visualizer” (sort of like you see in iTunes, Winamp, etc.). What’s different about this piece, though is that combines live webcam input with live audio input into a pulsating, moving interpretation of the world around the piece.
In some ways, the work can be considered just a “tool”. But, on the other hand – and more importantly, I think – the fact that the ranges of color, proportion, size, placement, and dimension have all been pre-designed by the artist to work cohesively no matter what the environmental input moves it into the realm of “art”.
In this post, I hope use the piece in a way that will give you an example of what it would look like as part of a real live installation and to help explain the ins and outs of my process.
THE BASICS
An easy example of where this would do really well is at a music concert. The artist would point the camera at the band or the audience, and, as it plays, the piece would morph and transform the camera input in time to the music and a projector would display the resulting visuals onto a screen next to the band (or even onto the band itself). This is just one suggestion, though. Interesting static displays could also be recorded based on live input to be replayed later. It’s this latter idea that you’ll see represented below (though you might notice my macbook chugging a little bit on the visuals…slightly offbeat. Thats a slow hardware issue :) ):
In that clip, I pointed the webcam at myself and a variety of props (masks, dolls, cats, the laptop, etc) as music plays from the laptop speakers. There was a projector connected to the laptop displaying the resulting transformations onto a screen in real time. A video camera was set up to record the projection as it happened. My setup isn’t much, but it can be confusing, so take a look below. My laptop with the piece on it, webcam connected to the laptop, projector projecting the piece as it happens, and video camera recording the projection:
TUTORIAL/EXPLANATION
As I said earlier, I used Quartz Composer – a free programming language from Apple upon which a lot of Mac OSX depends. Some non-technical artists might be a little bit leery of the term “programming language”, but Quartz is almost designed for artists. It’s drag and drop. Imagine if you could arrange lego’s to make your computer do stuff. Red lego’s did one type of thing, blue did another, green did a third. That’s basically Quartz. There are preset “patches” that do various things: Get input, transform media, output media somehow, etc. You pick your block and it appears on screen. If you want to put webcam input on a sphere, you would: Put a sphere block on the screen, put a video block on the screen, and drag a line from the video to the sphere. It’s as easy as that. First, I’d suggest you take a look at this short introduction by Apple here:
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/quartzcomposer.html
Then take a look at the following clip and I’ll walk you through how it works at a hight level:
The code for this is fairly straightforward:
In the box labeled “1″ on the left, I’ve inserted a “patch” that collects data from a webcam and makes it available to the rest of the “Composition” (as Quartz Programs are called). On the right side of that patch, you can see a circle labeled “Image”. That means that the patch will send whatever video it gets from the webcam to any other patch that can receive images. (Circles on the right side indicate things that the patch can SEND to others. Circles on the left indicate information that the patch can RECEIVE from others.)
The patch labeled “3″, next to the video patch, is designed to resize any images it receives. I have a slow macbook, but my webcam is high definition so I need to make the resolution of the webcam lower (the pictures smaller) so my laptop can better handle it. It receives the video input from the video patch, resizes it, and then makes the newly resized video available to any patch that needs it. (You can set the resize values through other patches by connecting them to the “Resize Pixels Wide” and “Resize Pixels High” circles, but in this case they are static – 640×480. To set static values, just double-click the circle you want to set and type in the value you want it to have.)
In the patch labeled “4″, we do something similar, but this time I have it change the contrast of the video feed. I didn’t really need to, but I wanted to see how it looked. The Color Control patch then makes the newly contrasted image available to any other patch that needs it.
On the far right, the webcam output is finally displayed via patch “8″. Here I used a patch that draws a sphere on the screen and textured the sphere (covered the sphere with an image) with the webcam feed after it has been resized and contrast added.
So now we have a sphere with the webcam video on it, but it’s not doing anything “in time” with the music being played.
What I decided to do was to change the diameter of the sphere based on the music as well as the color tint of the sphere.
If you look at patch “2″ on the left, you’ll notice 14 circles on the right side of it. These represent different (frequency) bands of the music coming in from the microphone. This would be the same type of thing if you were to be using an equalizer on your stereo (It’s actually split into 16 bands in Quartz, I just only use 14). Each of those circles has a constantly changing value (from 0.0000 – 1.0000) based on the microphone input. Music with lots of bass, for example, would have a lot of high numbers in the first few bands and low numbers in the last few bands). We use these bands to change the sphere diameter and color.
I chose to use a midrange frequency band to control the size of the sphere because that’s constantly changing, no matter whether the music is bass heavy or tinny. You can see a line going from the 6th circle down in patch “2″ drawn to the “Initial Value” circle of patch “5″. Patch “5″ is a math patch to perform simple arithmetic operations on values it gets and output the results. All I’m going here is making sure my sphere doesn’t get smaller than a certain size. Since the audio splitter is sending me values from 0.000 – 1.000, I could conceivably have a diameter of 0. So, I use the math patch to add enough to that value that my sphere will always take up about a 25th of the screen, at its smallest. Patch “5″ then sends that value to the diameter input of the sphere patch (#8) we discussed earlier.
It’s these kinds of small decisions that, when compounded on one another, add up to visualizations with specific aesthetic feelings and contribute to the ultimate success or failure of the piece.
Another aspect of controlling the feel of your piece is color. In patch 6, you see three values from the audio splitter go in, but only one come out. The three values I used as the initial seeds for “Red”, “Green”, and “Blue” values. Patch “6″ takes those values and converts them into an RGB color value. However, notice that patch “6″ has three “Color” circles on the right, but only one gets used? That’s because I designed that patch to take in one set of Red, Green, and Blue values based on the music, but mix those values into three -different- colors. So as the music changes, those three colors all change in sync and at the same time and by roughly the same amount, but they’re still different colors. That lets me ad
d variety to the piece and allows me, as the artist, to kind of create a dynamic “palette” to chose from that will always be different, but still keep constant color relationships. This contributes to a cohesive and consistent feel to the piece. A detailed explanation of how I do that is out of the scope of this post, but you can see the code below and take some guesses if you like:
And that’s pretty much that. We have a sphere that displays webcam input and which changes size and color according to the music playing nearby. But that’s really not all that interesting is it? What if we added a few more spheres? What if we used all three of the colors from patch “6″? What if those spheres all moved in time to DIFFERENT bands of the music?
The code might look something like this:
And the resulting output looks something like this:
Yeah I know the visuals are sortof silly and the song cheesy, but the music’s beat is easy to see and there just isnt that much in my apartment to put on webcam that I havent already.
Also, take a look at 55 seconds through about 1:05. The visualization goes a bit crazy. See the white box on top? You cant see in the video but that box lets me enter input parameters on the fly to affect how the visualization responds. This is the VJ aspect. For these visualizations, Ive only enabled 2: How fast/big the visual components get and how fast/slow they get small. In that 10 second segment, Im jacking them up a lot.
What about the original video? What does that code look like? See below. It’s a litle bit more complicated, but essentially the same thing. Instead of 16 spheres, I use a rotating 3D cube and a particle fountain (squares spurt out of a specific location like out of a fountain). In addition to just color and size, the music playing nearby also affects location, rotation, minimum size, speed of the particles, and a number of other visual elements:
At some point (as soon as I figure out the Cocoa), Ill upload the visualizer here as a Mac OSX application for download.
SUMMARY
So, what do you think? Is this art? If not, what is it? Just something that looks cool? In my mind, artistic vision and aesthetics are a huge component of making “multimedia” “new technology” art, no matter how big a component the technology is. Without some sort of understanding of what you are visually trying to communicate, it’s only by chance that you’ll end up with something that looks good. But, even beyond that, I found that I had to think pretty far ahead and understand my medium in order to create something that would look consistent AND visually pleasing no matter what environment it was in and no matter what it was reacting to. It was like writing the rules to create an infinite number of abstract paintings that would always look like they were yours.
Also, figuring out what to put in the webcam view when and at what distance is an important part. When Im paying attention (as in the first video), it adds a whole new dimension. When I dont care and point it at anything (as in the demo videos), the whole thing becomes a bit more throwaway.
Here’s basically how our day went down (hopefully Ill edit this later more, it’s a mess…i was REALLY exhausted when I wrote it):
Left the apartment an hour late, but managed to find a cab which took us fairly close to the mall (17th and E or so), so we didnt have to walk and got there on time. It wasnt as cold as I thought it was going to be, so I left a layer of clothes at home, which I later regretted. We got in the 17th and Consistution line, which was the closest but ultimately not the best. The were more people than I’d hoped there would be, but less than I expected. We’ll need to come much earlier inauguration day. Unfortunately, two things were wrong with the entry we chose, although we couldnt have known this ahead of time. First, the are on the constitution side of the reflecting pool got -nowhere- near as close to the lincoln memorial as independence ave side did (although realistically, because of things in the way, those guys probably still didnt have a -great- view). So, even if we had been first in, we were still a football field away. The second issue was that further lines got in just enough earlier that a ton of people went past before we could get in.
So, the early morning plan of attack ended up being a miss. We were packed in about 30-50 people deep trying to get that extra foot closer, but behind us it didnt seem to start to fill up for ages.
Paivi and I decided we’d rather not wait from 9am-2pm for a crappy view, so we wandered out to have coffee on 17th at that Caribou.
On the way out, though, we DID get to see Snipers setting up:
This proved fortuitous, because we ended up seeing Mr Obama twice within 25 yards of us (one of those times he waved at us). It was on the way back from coffee/lunch near the old executive building. He drove past in that awesome caddy he has and we could see him inside looking at us, smiling, and waving.
Barack Obama's Caravan before the We Are One concert
The second time was when he left an hour or so later for the concert. I thought I saw his figure outlined in one of the windows, but he was definittely in one of the cars. I have a video of Obama driving by here:
While we were waiting for him to come out a second time, a youngish asian lady had a megaphone and kept chanting that she knew how to make world peace happen if only obama would show us his birth certificate. Every time someone would bitch at her to STFU, she’s megaphone that she was being harassed to the police. As if. Im sure at that point in the day, they wouldve been more than happy to do a little harassing themselves.
We wandered back to the concert after that and ran into Doug and Nofcna (Nguyet) near the “Homo-Sex is a National Security Issue” fuckers. We tried to get back in to the main area, but at this point the checkpoints seemed to be closing. We opted to go check out the concert from the Jumbo-tron nearest to Independence Ave by the WWII memorial. At first, the sound was really bad. Doug and Nguyet eventually took off, discouraged that they could neither see nor hear. Fairly soon, though, the sound started to come through louder and we really enjoyed the show, even from so far back.
Some notes about the show:
a) Im pretty sure I could actually hear Biden’s actual voice echoing back to us. That guy was loud!
b) Im not a country music fan, but Garth Brooks is wildly successful for a reason
c) The “young adults” – all 10 of them – climbing on the tree nearby were about to tip it over. Their parents did a really crappy job raising them.
d) My wife is in love with Bono
e) Watching snipers scramble up onto towers is scary and unnerving, as are police in face-covering black masks with sunglesses
f) The rudest people are 50 year old successful white men
g) Tom Hanks presentation wouldve gone MUCH better if he’s been playing Forrest Gump up there
h) The Boss seemed to be trying to hard
i) Crowds singing along to songs rock
j) Barrack seems to have given the same speech in Baltimore?
k) Tiger Woods is not a good public speaker
l) Shakira, Usher, and Stevie Wonder worked well together
m) No one knew much about Josh Groban, but everyone seemed to have something to say about him
n) The scripts felt like a really slick advertisement.
o) Obama better know what he’s getting into and better be able to pull it off, because it is a long, fast, sad road down from this kind of a pedestal.
Afterwards, the roads out were clogged for pedestrians by pedestrians. It moved as a snails pace.
Paivi and I skipped that road (the one behind the washington monument) and fought our way across the mall directly. This ended up being much faster…much much faster. We followed the mob up towards dupont circle and it wasnt really until past K street that the entire road wasnt packed with pedestrians. It felt like we were marching for something, but we were really just going home.
Yes We Can!
Made it Dupont area, had dinner, metro’d home.
Really a nice day, ultimately, if exhausting.
As an aside – today we were at the Georgetown Barnes and Noble and ran into the same girl who was standing next to us the day of the concert. Crazy small town!
