Creative Coding

I would love to work on Loom. Loom is patterns linked to audiovisuals in some sort of way. As a kid, I’ve always been interested in websites that link patterns to sound. There was a website I visited that turned squares that you make white on a canvas, and each square would produce a sound and it would play sequentially as the canvas progresses towards the right. It was so simple, but It was very easy to get lost in. I want people to associate music with geometry. Music is very mathematical, but we enjoy the math subconsciously. Our brain makes sense of these patterns and systems into effortless flows and rhythms that sound pleasing to us. It would be amazing If I could visualize sound in an interesting and time-grabbing way.

The library that I wanted to look further into was the dimensions library. This library seems to look at the vector workings of p5js  functions and re works them to be able to work in dimensions that they normally would not. I am thinking of using this library to make some pretty wacky video playback world that the user could interactively move through if possible.

link to the library: https://github.com/Smilebags/p5.dimensions.js

For my project I tried to mess around with an excerpt from one of the films I did for class during my sophomore year that was about alien abduction. At first I thought about using pixel manipulation; but realised that given that the footage was shot in black and white – there wasn’t a whole lot I could do in isolating and manipulating different colour channels. Instead I tried to look for a more collaged approach – utilising different filters and blending tools to create a kind of tripped out version of the abduction. The original video can be seen to the left of the Canvas.

Sketch: https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/532249#

An issue I keep running into however is trying to distinguish the different layers from each other – as the “push , pop” method seems to have varying results, often still grouping layers together under the same filter.

 

The Seriously.js library seems pretty cool. I used to be a big movie gu (until college) and I was always amazed about how they do the effects of. I knew there was something called an editing bay where the producers and editors would lock themselves up for months to edit a hours of footage and condense it to 1 to 3 hours. They probably use some really expensive and high tech software to edit these videos which I don’t know have any experience in. But I have experience in coding and this library allows you to add effects to live or prerecorded videos through code.

p5.gibber

I found this library interesting because before the semester ends I want to create some kind of sound visualization. Looking at the examples of this library, I think it can not only be used in sound visualization sketch but also create simple synthesizer with p5.js. It seems like there is a separate function for controlling frequency as well, allowing me to create an interactive sketch that changes the sound. There is a whole online manual dedicated to this library so I have to spend some time figuring out how things work.

While on the p5js website, I found the dimensions library extremely interesting because it allows you to expand beyond the three dimensions typically found in p5js. The library expands the vector functions of p5js to make the dimensions work. On the p5js website and under the dimensions library, there is a picture of the square that seems to have multiple dimensions and that’s what peaked my interest initially. I think it would be challenging, but fun to work with multiple dimensions beyond the three we typically work with. In processing, working in 3D was confusing, but I think a lot of cool sketches could be made just by fooling around and changing the variables and the number of dimensions. I would potentially want to make a sketch that somewhat mirrors the galaxy because when I think of dimensions, I think of space; I would want to experiment with the effects and functions of the library to see if I could make a similar effect.

https://github.com/Smilebags/p5.dimensions.js

One P5.js library I am interested in using is p5.dom. p5.dom lets you interact  with HTML5 objects beyond the canvas, including video, audio, webcam, input, and text. One of the reasons that I initially came to NYU as a Computer Science Major was because I was drawn by the reach of CS; that something I could do from one computer could potentially reach millions of people over time. It’s always been about reach for me, and really maximizing my efforts. This is partly why I’m more inclined to use p5.js which allows you to display and interact with your work online, much easier than Processing because its written in JavaScript instead of Java. Based on what drew me into CS in the first place, the concept of libraries is really interesting because it introduces the potential to get even more from the code that I’m writing. I see myself continuing to code beyond this class, and even beyond college into my adult life, and the way I envision it is not through heavy backend that doesn’t really see the light of day, but through creating art and being able to share it with people. I’m taking Intro to Web next semester and I’m very excited by the potential of being able to use what I’ve learned in p5.js, as well as the library p5.dom to compliment the work that I’m doing in that class.