Some useful links I’ve collected recently. Morguefile is a collection of free high quality digital photos. I’ve used them for building mosaics with excellent results. FreeSound is a collection of free sounds, licensed using the Creative Commons License. ccMixter is a related site which collects songs, rather than individual sounds. I’ve been looking for interesting […]

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks. This is because I’ve been furiously working on a rewrite of my software synthesizer, Syd, originally written nearly 10 years ago. Syd is a digital music program that is designed for teaching basic computer music and synthesis concepts. I used Syd […]

Follow this link for a little more hand-cranked goodness.

David April wrote to recommend another good fractal program. Apophysis (for windows only, sadly). It’s an IFS fractal program capable of some gorgeous organic looking results. I first encountered IFS fractals in Michael Barnsley’s book Fractals Everywhere. Wikipedia says they were first developed by John Hutchison. Apophysis is scriptable, which means it is capable of […]

If you’re new to this blog, you may have missed some of the better posts from months ago. Since I haven’t bothered to collect them elsewhere, I thought I’d post them here. Visual Harmony Three Johns on Randomness Organum Mathematicum Entropy & Motion Graphics SF Cover Explorer Got your own favorite? Let me know, and […]

My favorite Los Angeles art gallery, Machine Project, is hosting a MIDI Scrapyard Challenge this Sunday, and I’ll be participating. Want to convert that old blender into a MIDI instrument? This is the time and place to do it. An all day workshop will be followed by a performance using newly created MIDI instruments, resurrected […]

Jos Leys is an expert user and programmer of the fractal imaging software Ultra Fractal. If you like circles and radial symmetry as much as I do, you will love his mathematical image gallery, which is filled with all kinds of circular goodness.

Wheel Music is another music visualization, using similar techniques to those I used in my Whitney Music Box. Each dot in the animation represents an individual note you are hearing. The notes are slowly traveling around in a circle. Each square represents a different tone cluster, or chord. Colors represent note values, and the radius […]

Krazydad Irregular Ryan Govostes writes: Hey Jim, I noticed a neat phenomenon while making myself a bowl of nutritious EasyMac (the fake microwaveable macaroni-and-powdered-cheese product from Kraft). The first step is to pour the noodles into a bowl and add a bit of water, then microwave for a few minutes. Now, obviously, when you put […]

One of my favorite composers, Gyorgy Ligeti, died this morning at the age of 83. Time for a little Lux Aeterna.