New blog, pyweek, etc.

I've started a blog for the cema crew, that will hopefully get updated on a daily basis. It contains short experimental artefacts built in a short (<30mins) http://thecemadaily.blogspot.com. It might take a while to get posts/week > 1.

Also, as I write this pyweek is running. It's a big biannual game programming competition, where the constraints are: it has to be written in the Python programming language, and it has to be started and finished within a week. I am entering a game, which I will hopefully finish for once, and will post here when I'm done. Wish me luck!

As part of my Beads work, I explored the possibility of bypassing Javasound and working directly with a low-level sound library. In doing so I built an (almost) complete Java wrapper around RtAudio, a low-level, cross-platform audio programming library. My project, JRtAudio is now accessible online, so check it out if you're interested.

As for whether Javasound is slower than, say JRtAudio, the results are not looking good, but are kind of obvious. The benefit of using JRtAudio only appears when you want a really simple API combined with low latency.

Having grown up with video games in the 8 and 16-bit eras (e.g., NES, SNES, Megadrive, C64), I am attracted to retro graphics and sounds from this era. Music with a limited palette of blips, beeps, noise, and such, can be surprisingly versatile - just look at scores from Mario to Zelda, and 8-bit/blip/chiptunes are definitely emerging as an popular alternative style (check out lsdj). My recent work with Beads has led me to build an 8-bit inspired sound synthesizer that runs in a web browser - Jsfxr. It is a clone of sfxr, a nifty retro sound effect generator. While Jsfxr doesn't compare to the original, it is fun to play with and demonstrates that Beads and Processing can play nice together. Building it also taught me how the coin blip from Mario can be generated. :)

 

Over the last month and a bit I've been working part-time on Beads, a UGen based sound synthesis and analysis library for Java. The library is under heavily development, but if you're interested in making crazy sounds and music you should definitely check it out. It is a native Java library, but can be used from within Processing without any hassles. There are a set of Beads tutorials available both for pure java and Processing (available on the website.)

Beads: "This is the website for Beads, an open-source project for computer music and sonic art in realtime performance, installation artworks, web content, and anywhere else you can think of putting it."