Tim Taylor | SoundLife @drtimt | Uploaded June 2013 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
This is a demo app for live analysis of a sound file to drive Game of Life dynamics.
The sound spectrum of the audio is analysed in a number of frequency ranges. Each column on the Game of Life grid corresponds to a certain frequency range (low frequencies to the left, high to the right). If the amplitude of the sound in a given range exceeds a threshold, a square in the corresponding column is switched on. Which square in the column is switched on depends on the amplitude of the sound in that frequency range, with a scaling factor that can be changed by moving the mouse up and down.
Moving the mouse from left to right controls how many frequency bands are sampled. With the mouse on the far left, the maximum number of bands are sampled, so that every column can potentially be affected by the sound. As the mouse is moved to the right, fewer bands are sampled, and hence fewer columns are affected by the sound; the columns that do correspond to sampled ranges are always spread out equally from left to right.
This app was developed as an exercise for the Coursera course Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps (class.coursera.org/digitalmedia-001)
The app was written in Processing, making use of demo code provided on the course (PlotFFTOnScreenDesktop) together with Game of Life code written by Jeffrey Guy (jjguy.com/life/). The audio was obtained from freesound.org/people/Timbre/sounds/71150/.
This is a demo app for live analysis of a sound file to drive Game of Life dynamics.
The sound spectrum of the audio is analysed in a number of frequency ranges. Each column on the Game of Life grid corresponds to a certain frequency range (low frequencies to the left, high to the right). If the amplitude of the sound in a given range exceeds a threshold, a square in the corresponding column is switched on. Which square in the column is switched on depends on the amplitude of the sound in that frequency range, with a scaling factor that can be changed by moving the mouse up and down.
Moving the mouse from left to right controls how many frequency bands are sampled. With the mouse on the far left, the maximum number of bands are sampled, so that every column can potentially be affected by the sound. As the mouse is moved to the right, fewer bands are sampled, and hence fewer columns are affected by the sound; the columns that do correspond to sampled ranges are always spread out equally from left to right.
This app was developed as an exercise for the Coursera course Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps (class.coursera.org/digitalmedia-001)
The app was written in Processing, making use of demo code provided on the course (PlotFFTOnScreenDesktop) together with Game of Life code written by Jeffrey Guy (jjguy.com/life/). The audio was obtained from freesound.org/people/Timbre/sounds/71150/.
