Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

Two weeks ago Paramount Pictures released “Bee Movie.” The plot involves a bee student that graduates from college with only one career choice—honey. This typical massively marketed film release—which included huge billboards of the letter “B”, flashy web banners on hundreds of sites, and a trailer featuring George Michael’s classic tune, “Freedom”—has since grossed $180,000,000 worldwide. “Bee Movie’s” professional infrastructure is complimented by its equally professional appearance, a derivative of tried-and-true 3D character animation techniques established by Disney’s 1995 hit, “Toy Story.”

Historically films were either strictly professional or amateur in terms of both infrastructure and their appearance, but nowadays “Bee Movie” stands firmly in just one corner of a broad landscape that accepts new possibilities between professional and amateur—appearance and infrastructure.

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Enjoy the next installment in the lovable Maxis/EA Series, just in time for Christmas!

Do you have what it takes to develop a rustic untouched landscape into a source of revenue for America’s top chain establishments? Prove it by bringing SimSuburbia to a population of 3500, while raking in 1 million dollars within in ten years.

The guidelines are simple. Run the game. Click the green button in the lower right to start the game. Use the mouse to select different objects and click on the landscape to draw them. Roads are a bit buggy at present, so click several times until you get the desired road type. Building chain establishments and stores will generate profits, but to get people to move into your town, you will need to build houses–the icon for this is the second to the bottom. Clicking the skull and cross bones followed by a click onto the landscape will start the game over.

Play it here!

The final piece at the Fall 2007 ITP Show. More photos here.

I’ve been busy these past couple days and haven’t had time to document the completion of pushMusic until now. Basically the way it went down, is that Rui and I passed code back and forth for several days leading up to the show. I initially coded a way of capturing all incoming midi data and redrawing it as simple lines spaced apart, where Y = time and X = midi value for velocity or pitch. I then extruded the vales onto gears, which stacked and rotated in time–the twenty teeth each correlating to a particular midi parameter from the Lordx tracks “Series”–a more ambient number, and “Forever Nineteen”–a new wave pop tune. It was Rui who late one night decided to break up the gear, removing some choice line segments to more effectively expose the various trajectories of the voices. I then reduced to the teeth count to 10 by consolidating the volume and pitch tracks into one track, where zero volume = zero pitch. This left empty space where no notes occurred, and we could start seeing the piece unfold before our eyes. Rui then added an alpha effect to improve the line visibility, as well as some rotational controls. I then added the final touch of placing the beat and measure metronome markers and having the current drawn gear blink on each beat. Rui has posted some beautiful screen shots of pushMusic on his blog:

http://itp.nyu.edu/~rpp227/digitalkitchen/2007/12/push_music_popmusic_screenshot.html

high resolution video capture:
https://itp.nyu.edu/projects_documents/1198290781_pushMusic-Video-desktop.mov

view source code:

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The lovable associative matching game has undergone over 20 revisions and several beta tests with children at Seton Hospital. The game–programmed entirely in Processing–will debut at the ITP Winter Show with other projects in the Inclusive Game Design Class.

Play it here.

I got the pet and the base communicating smoothly today, after tweaking response and request time between the two.  The moral: listen a lot, talk less.  Watch the video of them talking over wireless here.  Or download source code.

I recently was able to get Max/MSP to play and convert several midi files into a long string of integers that reflect each track instrument’s note pitch and velocity values. Essentially I did this by using several “seq” objects, each playing a voice in the midi file (I’ve yet to find an object in Max able to parse true polyphonic Midi files.) Those voices which I know to feature chords in the particular track I’m using, use the “poly” objects wired into “gate” objects to break out the individual voices. Values are strung together using the “sprintf” object. Finally I use the “udpsend” object (Thanks Vaibhav!) to send out the entire string through OSC. At present I have the Xcode terminal printing the values (see picture). These values will soon be used control variables in the PushMusic OpenGL visualizer program I’m writing with Rui.

Also pictured is the entire Midi file opened in a piano roll style editor in Logic Audio. I’ve rotated the image sideways to more easily distinguish patterns tying into vertical chronology. These patterns will be modulated against one another to inspire corresponding gestures in the 3D.

MidiParse Max patch I created is here.

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