Visual synthesis project

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Hello all
over the weekend I put together a little project that I’ve been thinking about for a while and thought I’d share it here since supercollider plays a central role in it.
It started with the idea of visualizing supercollider tweets (for example having a twitter bot replying to #sc140 tweets with a spectrogram image or a rendered .mp3). After experimenting a bit with rendering code snippets in non-real time using File.readAllString(inputFilePath).interpret on .scd files and rendering spectrograms with SoX, I gravitated more and more towards the idea of writing SC code not for sound as the end result but specifically for visual interpretation through sound, looking for visually interesting synthesis, amplitude, frequency and timbral shapes and so on.

The result is a Github repo with a growing collection of sc snippets which will be rendered into spectrograms and posted alongside the code on a Github page. The whole thing is still fairly rough around the edges but my goal was to first get it off the ground and see where it goes over time. Of course I’m open for contributions and pull requests adding new sketches which will be published on the site. I’m also very interested in contributions to the design of the page (specifically to the formatting/syntax highlighting etc of the code blocks) since I’m quite inexperienced with it.

to cut a long story short - here is a very loose and unsystematic exploration of visual sound synthesis. Feel free to add posts
https://lukasnowok.github.io/spectrology/

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Hey! You might also be interested in my video synth for SuperCollider, which I call Scintillator. More info at https://scintillatorsynth.org.

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This is absolutely fantastic!!!. Hadn’t heard of it. What a brilliant thing to make. Thanks a zillion. Diving right into it (I already installed it and did the tutorial). Sooo great! Amazing job!

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Very nice images.

(I’m in the progress of writing some synthesis macro’s in POV-Ray, also to marry sound & vision https://ingoogni.nl/ )

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I love these. Will definitely look into it. They are beautiful!

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I just wanted to say that I’ve been really enjoying these, and have been checking back in over the last few days hoping for new posts. Thank you for sharing!

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Do you have any showcase videos / demos? I can’t find anything.

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Thanks a lot for the feedback, I’m glad you’re enjoying these. :blush:
I’ll definitely keep adding things every now and then. I’ve been writing some more since the last post, just have to get into the habit of pushing to Github regularly.
I’d also love to include other peoples sketches. The way to do that should be quite simple - just send me an .scd file looking something like this and your name and I’ll put it up. Alternatively anyone could render their own images with this (that requires SoX to be installed).

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Hi Lukas,

Thanks for sharing the code and workflow!

With your site, and the times that I checked it out versus when I uploaded your code to listen to, it was fun to hear the sound after having looked at the image, and getting the correlation. There’s often an uncanny… I don’t know - onomatopoeic sense, for lack of a better word.

I’m just getting started with SC, and this is my first time working with sound like this. I’m now working toward getting my bearings in having events occur over time and what all that can be.

This seems like a great goal to focus my experimentation toward. And, even without having to get a grasp on all the dynamics of making music with code, the twenty second time frame in and of itself is gonna take some getting used to. I’m looking forward to it!

Boris

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Just FYI, the cmdPeriod code in ScinServer was messing up my command-. actions, so I had to change it to this:

cmdPeriod {
		if (addr.notNil&&defaultGroup.notNil, {
			addr.sendMsg('/scin_g_freeAll', defaultGroup.nodeID);
		});
	}
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That fixed it for me as well. Thank you!