Welcome, thanks for dropping by.

I'm a student here at Goldsmiths University studying a part time MSc in Arts Computing since October 2005, due to complete in summer 2007.

My interests, both in study and in practice, are primarily in algorithms that generate music, software art, electronic art and live programming.

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Sounds a bit nicer now... This time with a smaller font and an exciting slither of my desktop visible. Sorry about that, see it a bit bigger over here

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Frederic Leymarie and I have created a blog called SoundVis to document our research into the visualisation of sound and music. We'll be adding our findings to it as time allows...

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An early sketch of a system of vocables for describing manipulations of a sine wave.

The text is a bit small there, it's better in the original avi version.

Vowels give pitch, and consonants give movements between pitches.

Inspired by the notation of canntaireachd. Made with hsc (Haskell client for scsynth). As ever, code available under GPL
on application.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. It's nice to describe a sound in this way but to use it in music the sound has to change over time otherwise it gets repetitive and therefore boring in many situations. I think I either have to develop ways of manipulating these strings programmatically, or ways of manipulating how they are interpreted. Both approaches would involve livecoding of course...

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A new project:
speechless.lurk.org/rhythm.html

The idea is to use festival speech synth to turn what people type into rhythms, giving them a simple multi-user interface for playing words together.

It needs flash 8 or later, but all of the interface is in good old HTML - I'm just using flash for the audio stream and server communication. The javascript and flash was made with the open source haXe language, so I didn't have to install any dirty macromedia software on my computer.

Please play with it! All feedback very much appreciated. It'll run until 14th April, after which I'll release the sourcecode under the GPL for download, plus if anyone's interested, a DVD containing the audio from the two weeks.

Relatedly, I was excited to find out about Canntaireachd, which is to bagpipes what bols are to tabla. I'm looking forward to getting my own articulatory synthesis working...

[update] I wrote a report on this project.

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In association with TOPLAP, the loss livecode conference will happen in Sheffield (with some kind of preview event in london) from 20-22nd of July. Talks, performances and maybe workshops around the theme of livecoding. I'm co-organising it with Jim Prevett of access space.

Call for participation now available!

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Rohan Drape has made a nice tutorial to getting his "Hsc" Haskell bindings to SuperCollider installed and integrated with emacs. It's available here. This is exactly what I needed, I'm hoping to get started with some simple physical model synthesis this coming week.

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Coming up...

24th Feb 2007 - Ade, Dave and I are performing a full a/v slub set in London alongside Mick Grierson + Daniel Herbert, Matthew Yee-King and Ollie Bown. lurk.org/ for more info + tickets

26th April 2007 - I'm keynote speaker at the Queen Mary Department of Engineering Research Open Day.

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Peano weave applied to a slub classic for Ade's birthday..

Higher quality AVI available at slub.org

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Not really a review, just a strong recommendation... Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell is published mid January 2007, but Cambridge University Press are shipping already -- I got mine just before Christmas and wish I had it earlier... It is by far the best introduction to Haskell I've seen, at least for someone new to functional programming such as myself. The chapters on parsing and and IO are a good mark of the book, together clearly yet stealthily introducing monadic programming in an easily digestible form. Well this book has plenty of other aspects I could praise, but like I say this isn't a review, just go read and enjoy it yourself.

It's great to read a really clear, concise text book, I could almost feel my brain re-organising itself while I read it. The experience reminded me of reading K & R after some months of confused C hacking, feeling everything clicking into place. That would be over ten years ago now, gah...

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