A few good lungs (day 279)

June 2 (day 6)
More recording in the studio.  It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty.  They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the soundfield aspects.  A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record.  We had a list of sounds to individually record:

• words and phrases of uncertainty
• yawning
• dialogue and gossip pronouns (I, you, we, us, together, they, them)
• throat clearing
• breathing
• humming

It took about a half hour to record per individual.   We then recorded group sounds like footwork on the wooden floor, skin rubbing, and Tibetan chimes and singing bowl performance.  We finished the day at a Portuguese Grill.  Yum.

Miles in the recording booth. ←

June 3 (day 7)
A great day.  The new build of Derivative was posted and I was able to have multiple lungs breathing using geometry instancing.  It looks great.  The Macbook Pro I'm working with doesn't seem to have any problems dealing with the load so far.  I was so happy to see the multiple lungs breathing I forgot to take a screenshot or make a movie.  As I said enthrall is inversely proportional to documentation in my case.   At first I thought the multiple lungs looked kind of busy but when projected large the feeling was different.  We displayed them in conjunction with a collection of breathing sounds and it created a kind of reverent space.  I liked it a lot.

We ended the day at Sala Rosa, where they have great food and a performance space upstairs.  After eating we took in a Vaudeville show by Les Filles Electrique upstairs.  And what a show it was.  They really made us feel believe all the tricks.  It became such a magical place by the end of the show. There were some great visuals and projections. In one they projected talking faces on someone's face. A surprising result of a morphing face. In another they had a box made out of semi-transparent scrims with someone inside. Very interesting 3D kind of effect when projected from either side.

A seance right at the beginning of the show. ←

June 4 (day 8)
A somewhat unsatisfying day.  My goal for the day was to get varying videos playing in the instanced lungs.  I got close to a solution but ran into a slight hitch.  I was trying to fill a texture array that I could use in the shader for the lungs.  After struggling with how to do this, I posted to the forum and was delighted to get a response very quickly again!  How amazing that is.  The next build of Touch will include a quick and good way for me to fill my texture arrays.  It makes for a slow process but not one altogether unrewarding. 

Meanwhile, Miles processed the audio samples we've been recording, getting them ready for automatic generation of soundscapes based on OSC messages that I'll be sending him.  Hopefully we get to that bit tomorrow. 

Leila, Thea, and Zoe all went out to record stereo video with the new Canon Xacti cameras.  We'll take a look at the footage tomorrow.

We also have some more time in the recording studio tomorrow afternoon.  Now that I write it all down, it may be that some of these things don't get done.  Who knows.  Getting more material at this stage is both great and daunting.

We ended the day at a Lebanese restaurant called Daou.  Amazing food.

A song for this post.

Failure, Success, Failure... (day 276)

My goal for today was to get a few pairs of lungs breathing independently, or at least visually distinct from each other.  Getting instancing working in Touch took me a little while but it worked and in the end I had a little group of identical lungs breathing.  But the animation on the lungs looked wrong because the instancing broke the pivot point of the objects.  So my little success turned into a pretty big failure as I tried to alter the pivot on an instance basis, to no avail.  I finally decided to write to the Derivative forum.  Lo, I heard almost right away from one of their developers who said it's a bug.  He'll be releasing a workaround in a day or two.  I was almost relieved to hear that my defeat was not solely from rust.  The workaround involves writing a shader to rectify the order of transformations.  Since I had to write a shader for the lungs anyway, it's not such a hardship.  Rather more like a prod.

Tomorrow we spend the majority of the day in the recording/listening studio.  It is the last day in the studio so hopefully we will record everything we'll be needing later on.

I found one thing that Vancouver is better at than Montreal: Public Transit.  I never realized how smooth and uncomplicated Vancouver's system is until I came here and tried to find my way around a maze of different systems for the bus, metro, and different regions.  So many frustrations later I had to admit to myself that it couldn't solely be my unfamiliarity making this a scene out of The Castle.  And it's expensive!  $5.75 to go one way from where I'm staying in St-Hubert to the Plateau in Montreal. 

We played the Tulip Theory production song in the studio today.  This song became our theme song when Steve Nichols played it over and over again, particularly when things were tense or tedious.  Here it is:

A song for this post.

Hello lungs (day 57)

I took some time today to render the lung model to see if I could get the transparency to work correctly and maybe play around with the video mapping.  I got as far as getting the transparency to work and then ran into a resolution problem.  To my chagrin, Touch Designer will only render to a maximum horizontal resolution of 1280...unless I pay $599 for a commercial license (per machine).  I've asked if they have educational pricing and we'll see.  It's strange that I hadn't notice this before when I rendered to the screen in the lab.  But looking back, it does explain the slightly squished look of the lungs.   Even at the slightly lower resolution, the lungs look pretty good.  I'm really starting to get fond of the shape of the lungs.  They're almost friendly and sweet.  Here is a pic (which is down-res'd):

The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look.  I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look.  We'll see.  Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.

I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro.  It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar.  It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it.   It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback.  It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot).   But this minor worry is not going to stop me.   I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do.  The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.

A song for this post.