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)

Fundamental animation techniques


By using counters and simple mathematical calculations, we can indeed describe all sorts of movements a sprite of arbitrary complexity may perform over time. Notwithstanding, animation is not limited to only moving the sprites around; quite often actually, we will be looking into implementing certain effects or more complex kinds of motion.

Trailing effects

A typical case is that of adding trailing effects to an animation. If done wisely, trailing effects will make our animations a lot more interesting and organic. We can easily achieve such effects if we merge the current frame with the previous ones rather than replacing them. Consider the following code wherein we set the clearOnRefresh variable to false (to instruct UserView to merge every frame with the previous ones) and use a semitransparent rectangle to dampen the previous contents before actually drawing the new content.

( // rotating windmill trailing effect
var window, userView, windmill, speed =...