Astral Physics

As promised at my brief demo at 360|Flex San Jose last week, I’m now releasing the Merapi library for Processing.

Processing is a Java-variant built mostly for artists or for anyone who wants to create quick prototypes.

Merapi is an opensource Java library that gives access to Java from AIR - Adobe’s own OS-agnostic runtime (for the desktop, not a browser plugin) built around the Flash Player.

But most of you already knew that.

It’s really nothing too complicated (just wrapping the JAR file correctly), but it will make it a bit easier for you to get started with Merapi in Processing.

What to do:
1) Download Merapi Processing Lib Beta.
2) Wherever your actual Processing binary resides, you will find a folder called “libraries”. Unzip merapi.zip into this directory. (Your directory structure should be {ProcessingDir}/libraries/merapi/library/… which will contain all the necessary JAR files for Merapi.)
3) Open your Processing IDE (restart if it’s already open), go to the Menu->Sketch->Import Library->merapi. This will import the necessary packages, but there’s one last step before you’re in the clear. The way that Processing imports all of the packages becomes a bit troublesome. If you simply try to create an instance of the Merapi “Bridge” class, you will get a compile error. To resolve this… (See Step 4)
4) Change the import line import merapi.*” to “import merapi.Bridge;”

Also, Adam Flater whipped up this quick video demonstrating the Lego Mindstorm robot cruising around thanks to Bluetooth<->Java/Merapi<->AIR.

I moved to Denver. I live in Denver now. Here I am in Denver, just living, after my move.

I’m really looking forward to living here. I’ve been here for a couple of weeks, and I’ve already seen more natural beauty than ever before in my life. The mountains, the lakes, the parks, the people (SURPRISE! Women don’t have to wear makeup to be beautiful!).

Oklahoma was beginning to wear me out because I felt that I was around a lot of miserable people. I was surrounded by a lot of positivity as well, but for me, the majority just didn’t seem to want to be alive. It seems to be an oversimplification, but on my own personal level, I attribute this wet blanket to the weather…which is…a wet blanket. The summers are so hot and humid that it’s miserable to be outside for more than 30 minutes (unless you have a pool!) The winters are bitter and have very little excitement to offer…and people generally go nuts in the winter in Oklahoma (including me). I LOVE being outside, so summer and winter are just TORTURE in a place like that. Spring and Fall are, of course, beautiful, but it seems that Oklahoma doesn’t have those any more…just two long Seasons of Suck.

Pan to Denver, where the sun is always shinin’ and breeze is always blowin’…where you can drive an hour and be in the beautiful mountains…where you can find people embracing life everywhere, all day long…where most people seem to be happy to be alive, and treat you accordingly. It’s infectious. I’m always doing something, never sitting, bored or depressed. And I expect this to last.

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet in the midst of suffering
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straight-forward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God’s favorites,
for they neither put God to the test nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
-Bumper Sticker

“The best things in life aren’t things.”
-Bumper Sticker

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.”
-Ekhart Tolle

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive…And then go, and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
-Harold Whitman

“The breaking of the moral code is the breaking of natural law. All excesses or the practice of conduct leading to excesses are unhealthy, as well as immoral. This affords new views of many things, which, differently considered, lose relation and significance. When men realize that different practices disturb physical equilibrium, they will at least appreciate the uses of the law, even if they fail to follow it. The law is not short-sighted. At times it is simply rendered, and men imagine the truth as something far-fetched and fanciful, but the wisdom is real, as its practical application verifies. We are often blindly led by desire into paths seemingly strewn with pleasure, when, in reality, they are bordered with pain. Many deeds are “like goodly apples, rotten at the heart.” We are beguiled by the sophism of desire. The moral has value in that it is protective. The immoral is injurious. When we do wrong it is ourselves whom we injure. The influence of conduct may extend to others, but the individual reaction is of far greater consequence. This idea, thoroughly established in consciousness, would inhibit the committal of many a crime. As it is, men believe they are pleasing themselves when they are frequently causing themselves illness and sorrow as a result of thoughtless conduct. It is like a sphere. The presenting side of the sphere seems pleasing and promising, but the opposite side of dark and foreboding. The personality turns the presenting side about to obtain a more complete view, and the dark side shows itself. That is the meaning of immorality. When we are immoral, we are our worst enemies. As the soul evolves, it discovers that it has neither friend nor enemy, but that its own acts attract good and evil conditions. The soul, in this, is absolutely free. Within its own depths lies the power to evoke bliss or pain, and as most persons are in ignorance of how to arouse the hidden forces of the soul, they measure out pain to themselves, although their purpose is self-indulgence. Pain and repeated pain follows, because the soul has not as yet developed the discrimination which distinguishes between the things which truly make for pleasure and the things which cause pain. The appearance of things deceive. The eye of the mind must train itself to see beneath the surface and to distinguish the germ of pain in the heart of seeming pleasure. There is no happiness in immoral or selfish acts. Inordinate passion leads to mental and physical ruin. The drain on nervous energy is a robbing of the vital stamina. Passion is the perversion of natural desire. The fire and fever of inordinate desire consume the mental and psychic forces, disturb the instinctive life and destroy the conditions for spiritual harmony and progress.”

-Walter Winston Kenilworth, Thoughts On Things Psychic

Processing is a sketching language. It is very nice for prototyping!

I have been enamored with astronomy and astrophysics lately, and I’m really wanting to model a supernova or galaxy formation, but my skills are just not quite there. I need to better understand the math behind the physics, and the physics behind OpenGL.

Anyway, I made some of these little spherical doodles today.

Fibonaaci was a real swell guy. He figured out some things about life and nature. And numbers. He was neat. Boy, I like smart people.

I did this the other day because I needed a distraction. It’s kinda the Fibonacci sequence. It looks like hair. The calculation choked and took a long time to draw all of the points. This computer was working hard for the money.

Figure 1: Not Hair

The art show on Friday went well. We didn’t face any technical difficulties, the art was good, the music was good. I played keys with The Novelist, and our performance went well. Jake Hand recorded it and it actually sounds great for a little stereo mic. I’ll post the full recording when it’s uploaded.

Also, I modified the original visualization a little bit. It was really just a starting point, and once I got all the technical kinks worked out (related to analyzing the audio spectrum data without playing the audio in real-time) I was able to modify the visuals a bit. As you might have noticed, the original was based partially on Brendan Dawes’ Sonic Dots - with some important modifications - but based on it nonetheless. I changed the code up to add some different flare, and I was in the process of changing it more when I ran out of room on my hard drive. Processing tried to save my sketch and since there was no room, it actually deleted all of my code. I can re-write (probably best to refactor now anyway), but this was two days before the show and I took it as a sign that I should just get on with it and turn in what I had. I ended up displaying both versions because I couldn’t decide which I liked more. Here’s version two of the visualization based on Jesse Cohen’s “My First Music Toy.”

This is round 1 of what I’m doing for this new-fangled art show coming up on Friday, here in Oklahoma City.

The music was created by Jesse Cohen of The Weather Inside. Yes, I’m in this band, but Jesse writes most of the music, and this is one of my favorite songs he’s done.

I was finally able to put some time into making sure that the NetStep application runs using the most recent (publicly) available Silverlight runtime. I have tested this version on the Mac (pretty good performance!) and in Windows (through Parallels on my MacBook Pro). The performance in my particular setup was much better in OSX, but I have a feeling that would be different if I had a dedicated Windows machine.

NetStep is a collaborative musical step sequencer. While this isn’t an electronic music primer, I’ll give a brief overview of what NetStep actually is.

A step sequencer is an electronic music device that allows the musician to program patterns of various “samples,” or sounds. One sample may be a bass drum kick, another might be a snare hit. The musician can use a sequencer to control when these samples are played back, the tempo in which they are played, and usually what effects are applied to the samples.
NetStep is collaborative. In two-player mode, each user is given two “tracks” to work with. (A track is simply a row of “steps” where each step is tied to a sample. When a step is active, the associated sample is played when the playhead moves over that step). When a user hits the “Play” button, NetStep syncs itself with the other user’s sequence, and the two sequences are played back simultaneously. In this way, two musicians can work separately, but preview the joint composition at any time.

Currenty, NetStep only supports built-in samples. In my initial tests, it seems that not all samples are playing correctly, but I’m sure this will be worked out (most likely by a future release of Silverlight).

To get started with NetStep, click here.

**EDIT** - Patrick Hansen, my designer cohort in this NetStep affair, made an informative and attractive user manual.

1. Enter whatever username and password you’d like; this functionality is only used for identification with the other NetStep user.
2. Select single- or multi-user mode. Currently, multi-user is very very primitive. It will only work for two users at a time, and it’s a bit buggy. I hope to improve the backend in the future, or I might just set it up to run as an MSN Messenger application and use the real-time chat network for data transport…we’ll see.
3. Click on the samples in the top 3 “Sample Boxes” in order to preview them. As I said before, it seems that not all samples are playing, so click around until you find some that work.
4. When you find a sample you like, drag it onto a “step.” (The little orange buttons in the main part of the app.) The step will light up, indicating that a sample has been dropped and activated.
5. Play around with different samples, placing them on different steps. If you’re unfamiliar with step sequencers, just play around until you get the hang of how these things work.
6. When you’re ready to test your creation, hit the big orange “Play” button on the bottom. It doesn’t say “Play,” but if you don’t know what a Play button looks like, turn off your computer and pick up a shovel and kill a moose.

You’ll notice the numbers near the play button on the bottom. These represent “pages.” When you start the app, you are automatically on the first page, but the sequencer actually goes through 4 pages before it cycles back around to the beginning. Think of each page as a separate canvas, where all 4 canvases are linked together back-to-back.

I hope this brief tutorial helps the beginner get into this program. Keep in mind that this was built very quickly and is still quirky; I would call this release a Pre-Public Alpha v .2 Super Deluxe Hi-Five. So, please give me feedback; tell me what makes sense, what doesn’t…what works, what features you’d like to see (unless it’s already the most perfect piece of interactive software you’ve EVER seen).

Cheers, Enjoy.