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 Controller


Having implemented the View and the Model, we now need to ensure that they communicate with each other and that their elements are properly updated. The Controller is a simple object, at least when compared to the Model. It only has two basic responsibilities: to be the mediator between the Model and the View, and to update the state of the Model itself according to the rules that govern our system. The Controller will consist of the standard init and initiated (in our design) members as well as the necessary gestaltUpdate and populationUpdate agents. Note that the Controller needs access to both the Model and the View, therefore, when we initialize it, we should make sure we assign the latter to variables accessible to all elements of the Controller.

Game of Life

In essence, Snakes is a kind of Game of Life. The population changes according to a very specific set of rules that determine what will happen when two snakes meet. Keeping in my mind the result of what will happen...