Final Year Project Video Demonstration

For any one who wishes to know what Music Technology at Edinburgh actually means? well this is what i created for my final year project, a literal creative fusion of music technology and technology! Enjoy!

And so it begins

Three weeks till deadline day, writing of the report commences. Once its all handed in i shall update this blog with some of the latest research and software i have develeoped using the kinect. As well as all the other cool things Iv done this year.

3D Kinect - Kinect SDK, XNA, Max/Msp and Voice Control

Its been a little quiet on the blog front, but many things have been programmed and I just havent had the time to update this.

I just wanted to post a recent Kinect based development which is using the Kinect in a 3D enviroment

Check out the video below. Any questions or if you want the source just let me know

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS_6sXLS788

Max/Msp to Kinect Via OSC for Offical Microsoft SDK

Today I finished the very first stages of my 4th year research project which was finding a way to take data from the Xbox Kinect and send it to Max/Msp. By using the Ventuz OSC C# wrapper i was able to pack all the X, Y, Z data for all the skeletal points into an OSC bundle and send that to Max where it was unpacked in the patch.

The data sent from the Kinect is the unchanged co-ordinate system of values in metres rangeing from -1 to 1.

That being said the data sent from Kinect to Max can be used by any device that is capable of reading OSC packets .The format of the OSC message is

/joint/skeleton_[1/2]/[joint] x, y, z

This is a simple implementation allows quick and easy access to the full power of the kinects skeletal tracking in windows for users of the offical SDK over OSC. I hope it can be of some use.

Download
MediaFire Mirror

Chaos Music - The Final Piece

Chaos music is a composition based on my research and programming of the functions documented in my previous post. The piece uses the output data from the chaotic functions to drive musical synthesis with the built in functions of CLM, more explanation about methodology can be found in the attached report.

Final Piece



Download Source and Report

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Algorithmic Comp. Piece 2 Research - Choas Functions

For my final year piece iv been researching choatic functions and non-linear maps. Below is a selection of function iv ported into Lisp. Each function outputs a text file that can be imported into most graphing software (the corresponding pictures were all produced with MATLAB). I intend to implement these functions and use there output to drive a piece of music.

The Logistic Equation

(with-open-file (*standard-output* "logistic.txt" :direction :output
                                  :if-exists :supersede)
(let*  ((x 0.5)
 (r-env '(0 1 1000 4.0))
 (r 0.0))


   (loop for i below 1000 do
  (setf r (envelope-interp i r-env)
     x (* r (* x (- 1 x))))
  (format t "~D ~D~%" r x)
  )))

The Henon Map

Algorithmic Composition with Common Lisp Music - Piece 1

This composition was used as an inital exploration into the world of Lisp and Common Lisp Music 4 (CLM). It experiemtned with using the builtin instruments as well as instruments provided by the course lecturer. It takes loose inspiration from a piece by John Chowning with more explanation in the report. All samples used are referenced from within the source file and can be downloaded from www.freesound.org

Final Composition



Download Source and Report

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Film Music Post 1950 - An Analysis of Pulp Fiction

My final piece of work was an analysis of Quentin Tarrantinos Pulp Fiction. I looked at how the film uses recorded music in various ways to add extra depth to it's characters and to also provide a commentry to the film without the need to dialogue.

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Pulp Fiction

Taking Music to the Next Level

An essay on the way the video game industry has influenced, music production, promotion and consumption. It looks at three seperate areas, The music of games and video game sound tracks, Music with games - Chip tunes and 8-bit and also Music as games - focusing on the rise of guitar hero and the effects this had on popular culture.

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Taking Music to the Next Level

Film Music Post 1950 - An Analysis of John Carpenters The Thing

An analysis essary looking at John Carpenters 1982 thriller The Thing, it focus on the music and special effects on the film focusing on the delibrate uses of silence and diegetic sound. The Timing table is a breakdown of the film by sound, it looks at the different tracks, when they come in and how they interact with the image.

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Essay || Timing Table