Other projects
Music circuit simulations
A collection of simple, musical electronic simulated and animated in Flash. The circuits include oscillators, filters and envelope generators. Your can build own circuits in the applet and save the results.
Terrapin
The Terrapin library provides a turtle drawing object in Processing. Designed with LOGO's educational principles in mind, the turtle presents uncomplicated commands and an intuitive metaphor to the new programmer. Teaching with the turtle offers a gentle introduction to the imperative, procedural and abstract thinking skills needed by new programmers.
Phasetoy
An online musical sketch. Easy to play, fun and relaxing. Phasetoy is based on an old studio pickledonion app. Click in the boxes to turn notes on and off.
Utopia
The Utopia Model is a minimalist artificial life ecosystem, designed to explore models of utopia. The population of animats - digital life forms - follow rules of attraction and avoidance written to manage their needs for interaction. Their collective efforts to fulfil their desires within the constrains and opportunities of the social landscape forms an emergent social psychology, beyond their personal intentions or understandings of their situation.
A project to extend and exhibit this model has been funded by the Arts Council.
Evo-bar
Working under the auspices of the Institute for Unnecessary Research's Food Research Programme, I developed Evo-bar for the Brighton and Hove Food and Drink Festival 2006. Evo-bar uses genetic algorithms to evolve cocktail menus in software. Audience feedback determines the fittest drinks in a generation which survive and cross breed, producing the next menu. Guided by the audience's tastes, later generations of menus contain more delicious drinks.
Breakage
Breakage is an "artificially intelligent", live drum machine. It uses a neural network to learn patterns in your rhythms, offering a powerful and easy way to play and compose break beats on a higher level than is possible with existing software.
I've presented Breakage in a guest lecture for Music Informatics students at Sussex University. It's also been distributed with and discussed in Computer Music and DTMM magazines. It was featured in Dave Phillip's Linux Journal blog and won SMM's editor's choice award.
Midi Data Miner
MDM learns correlations between notes and control changes in MIDI streams. After training MDM on your music, it acts as an intelligent, personalised auto-accompaniment. For example, MDM can be trained to add vibrato to blue notes, vary sustain as you change octave or apply any learned effect when particular runs of notes are played. With practise, this allows you to perform more complex synthesizer pieces than are possible with a keyboard alone.
MDM is based on ideas and code from my undergraduate dissertation, which won Searchspace's 2005 prize for best Computer Science project.
Pendulodic
Pendulodic is an interactive soundscape installation produced in collaboration with Benedict Sheehan and Caia Matheson. A pendulum containing a camera swings over a sculptured stone beach. The colours of the stones are detected by the camera, triggering envelopes of sound. The melodic movement of the pendulum controls the beat. The audience can swing the pendulum to create their own composition.
Pendulodic was exhibited at the Big Blip 2004.