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As promised in the previous post, here are demo videos of my three new Quartz Composer Webcam Audio Visualizer compositions. I’m being a bit silly in them, but that’s because I dont have an external webcam or anything else more artistic to point it at tonight. In the future, I might do a real non-demo piece of art with one or more of these. No promises, though. Next post will be about security, though, I swear. :)
Well, the HacDC Hacker’s Lounge event/party got canceled – which was too bad. However, I did write some valuable code and make some pretty cool looking new compositions. The code isn’t ready for release, but I did put up the compositions and they’re available for free download here: http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/quartz-composer-downloads/
I don’t have video for them yet (maaaybe later today), so you’ll just have to try them out for yourself. I actually like all three of these much more than the original.
Remember, OS X / Quartz Composer only.
( Hmm. I guess I should write a viewer for these so you don’t need Quartz. Many projects, little time, but we’ll see… )
EDIT: THIS HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO SNOW. Not sure what to do after shmoocon Friday night? Not going to the con but need something to do? Come over to the HacDC Hacker’s Lounge event for a little while (runs 8pm-2am). I’ve been putting some fun NEW interactive Quartz video projections together for the event (link goes to early older work – need to show up to see newer stuff) and Daniel Packer will be doing some audio with supercollider. Oh yeah, and I hear there will be booze.
I can’t tell you if there will be 10 people or 100 there, but if you take a chance and show up, that’s 1 closer to 100 :)
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.
