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)

The Model


The Model is probably the most complicated object in our project, since it holds all the custom models we will use in Snakes. We need to design two singleton objects, namely population and gestalt. Both are singleton because in Snakes we need exactly one instance of both. We also need snakeFactory to construct snake objects. However, as we have already discussed, the latter consists of several parts, therefore, we need to model each of them as well and implement all the necessary factories, since we will need more than one. Because of its complexity, we will only give excerpts of the code here; the complete Model.scd file can be found online in this book's code bundle.

Aggregates and wrappers

A snake entity is complex, or what we call in computer science, an aggregate (or a composition), since they consist of various dissimilar parts. For instance, they have body, personality, brain, and voiceDef associated with them. voiceDef stands for a unique sound synthesis algorithm for each...