Book Image

Mapping and Visualization with SuperCollider

By : Marinos Koutsomichalis
Book Image

Mapping and Visualization with SuperCollider

By: Marinos Koutsomichalis

Overview of this book

SuperCollider is an environment and programming language used by musicians, scientists, and artists who work with audio-files SuperCollider has built-in graphical features which are used in conjunction with the sound synthesis server to create audio-visual mapping and sound visualization. If you wish to create data visualizations by acquiring data from audio and visual sources, then this book is for you.Digital sound artists need to analyze, manipulate, map, and visualize data when working on a scientific or an artistic project. As an artist, this book, by means of its numerous code examples will provide you with the necessary knowledge of SuperCollider's practical applications, so that you can extract meaningful information from audio-files and master its visualization techniques. This book will help you to prototype and implement sophisticated visualizers, sonifiers, and complex mappings of your data.This book takes a closer look at SuperCollider features such as plotting and metering functionality to dispel the mysterious aura surrounding the more advanced mappings and animation strategies. This book also takes you through a number of examples that help you to create intelligent mapping and visualization systems. Throughout the course of the book, you will synthesize and optimize waveforms and spectra for scoping as well as extract information from an audio signal. The later sections of the book focus on advanced topics such as emulating physical forces, designing kinematic structures, and using neural networks to enable you to develop a visualization that has a natural motion with structures that respect anatomy and which come with an intelligent encoding mechanism. This book will teach you everything you need to work with intelligent audio-visual systems to extract and visualize audio-visual data.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Abstractions and models


Suppose that we really like the particular shape in the preceding screenshot and that we want to integrate it in a series of different drawings, in other words, to cast it as a sprite (that is, an independent structure integrated to a broader scheme). Of course, having to manually define the positions of the anchor points for each different case would be tedious, counterintuitive, and really shortsighted from a programmer's point of view, so we need to come up with some kind of abstraction. We could just put all the necessary instructions inside a function and make all the calculations relative to its arguments. However, this approach proves shortsighted too, as sooner or later we will encounter situations wherein we would want to interact with our shape after it's being created. What we really need is an abstract prototype we could use to spawn unique independent instances of our structure that we can later interact with. Furthermore, using prototypes, we can easily...