frey

hey, sorry about the late notice but I’m performing at a placard (headphone) concert tonight at 2300 CET (11am Saturday morning, New Zealand time) in Poitiers, France as part of the Make Art festival.

you should be able to listen to to it here:
http://makeart.goto10.org/2008/?page=streaming&lang=en

So, if you happen to be doing what the subject line says – drawing anything into a CGContextRef that was created using CGBitmapContextCreate – and you’re seeing nothing but black, the trick is the following: you have to memset the the pixel data to all 0xFF’s before you draw.

For example, to draw a PDF document reference by ‘document’:

// allocate pixels
unsigned char* pixels = new unsigned char[thumb_height*thumb_width*4];

// create context
CGContextRef context = CGBitmapContextCreate(pixels, thumb_width, thumb_height, 8, 4*thumb_width, CGColorSpaceCreateWithName( kCGColorSpaceGenericRGB ), kCGImageAlphaNoneSkipLast );

// clear
memset( pixels, 255, thumb_width*thumb_height*4 );

// render page 1 into the pixels array
CGPDFPageRef page = CGPDFDocumentGetPage( document, 1 );
CGContextDrawPDFPage( context, page );

(For some reason I just wasn’t able to create any kind of RGBA context with CGBitmapContextCreate() – I always had to use the skip-alpha enum. Weird.)

From April until July 2007 I was resident with the Modulate collective in Birmingham, UK. They hosted me and looked after me and generally provided an excellent environment for me to develop my practise, to work out some things about what i was doing, and to begin to explore the European side of the world. This residency was in fact the thing that first brought me from New Zealand to the UK, and it has led directly to the connections I have made in Europe and elsewhere. So I was and still am greatly honoured to have been selected by them to undertake it.

In March earlier this year I went back to Birmingham to visit them again, and to work on a little video collobarative project involving using audio to control live video. While I was there we spent a couple of hours talking together about what the residency meant to all of us. They have just put up the video and audio from these conversations on their weblog over here.

Lovely.

So, I’m involved in this project called RjDj, which is artistically very hard to describe, but technically, generative music via Pd on the iPhone. And it’s getting a little bit real; it’s interesting (great, actually) to be involved in a project generating this much attention.

I made two scenes for the album (paid download), Eargasm and Noia. You can see Eargasm in the following video, it’s the first scene they demo:

.. I really like how something I’ve made has got an American TV show host jumping around like a twit and blowing a party honker thing on national television… excellent.

I’m currently on a residency in the Austrian alps working on some new scenes. There’s a tribute to Iannis Xenakis in the form of an interactive, shakeable version of ‘Concret pH’, as well as something for being angry, and a new very-in-progress scene inspired by close listening to some Beaucoup Fish – era Underworld (in particular the tracks Skym, Winjer and Jumbo).

all right, that was surprisingly painless.

now running the newest most spangliest version of WordPress. huzzah!

the tracks stuff is still a bit broken. i’ve been meaning to overhaul that for ages anyway…

hey,

this site got hacked – probably because i was running a very old version of WordPress. update, children! updating is Good!

will be restoring most content soon, hopefully.

cheers

Hey,

I’m at Ars Electronica, as part of the openFrameworks Lab @ars:

http://ars.oflab.cc/
http://www.aec.at/en/festival2008/program/project.asp?iProjectID=14447

More updates later, possibly, if I’m not having too much fun… ;-)

i just dug this up out of an old hard drive – it’s for a project for school, back when i was studying eloctroacoustic composition at Victoria University.

MP3

sociocultural meanings

What it does
————

Compresses digital audio signals, allowing them to be transmitted across computer networks with significantly reduced size and thus cost and technological requirements.

Lossy compression format: discards audio information considered ‘unnecessary’ to the faithful reproduction of the sound. Uses a combination of filtering systems and transforms to turn a time-domain signal (PCM waveform) into a frequency-domain signal.

How it is used
————–

digital broadcast

share files

How its function and use translates into sociocultural meaning and potential use in sound art
——————————

Reduced transmission cost radically lowers barriers to entry
- For free, anyone can share anything with anyone from anywhere on the world.
-> crude
-> defenders
-> anne westphalen?
-> sami abu shumays

Collaboration with people around the world
-> exquisite corpse

Complete shift in the relationship between distributors, publishers, and creators. Why go on to iTunes and download music for $1.99 when you can access piles of high-quality music for free?
-> westphalen
-> speakeasy

Access to vast archives
-> wax cylinders
-> intro inspection

Industry fear of this ->
Copyright strengthening, embedding of DRM into technology to support a dying industry
–> lessig
-> christina
-> intro inspection

in popular music, shift to single, unfocussed listening, loss of fan loyalty: complete commodification, further extension of capitalism into music on one hand;
on the other hand, massive democratisation: myspace

Since I couldn’t find this in an easy-to-use format anywhere else, here’s how you use gnuplot to plot a list of numbers sent in with stdin:

(echo plot \"-\" with lines; cat numbers.txt) | gnuplot

numbers.txt is a list of numbers, with or without terminating semicolons. Scientific notation is ok.

(30 minutes later) … and, here’s how to write a pdf graph of each text file in the current directory:

ls *.txt | perl -e 'while(<stdin>) { chomp; system "(echo set term pdf; echo set yrange [-1:1]; echo plot \\\"-\\\" with lines; cat $_ ) | gnuplot > $_.pdf"; }

(and so I don’t lose it, here’s how to generate a whole bunch of testunits:

perl -e 'for ( $i=1; $i<60; $i+=5 ) { for ( $j=$i+1; $j<150; $j*=1.5 ) { print "#X obj ".($i*40)." ".(int($j))." testunit $i-".(int($j))." $i ".(int($j))." senergy;\n"; } } ' > 1.actions/testunits.pd.txt

)

I’ve updated ofxOsc to v0.2 – now with OSC Bundle support. Check it out here.