Bebe Barron is no longer with us. “Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady. ” writes composer and teacher Barry Schrader, to his mailing list of electro-acoustic music fans.

You can learn more about Bebe and her composing partner Louis Barron, and the ground-breaking work they did to create the music and sound effects for the film “Forbidden Planet,” over at NPR, which still carries a radio piece they ran a few years ago.

Here are some clips from the film, with their music.

“Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one’s work is to be judged in any regard by it’s influence, acceptance, longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an enormous success. It remains the most widely known electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music.” — Barry Schrader

I make these things all the time, but don’t know what to do with them….

Click here… put on some headphones, and press the ‘full screen’ button for a little trance…

I’m working on a set of Slitherlink puzzles based on the Islamic-inspired tiling shown here, from Ensor Holiday’s book “Altair Design”. The pattern contains tiles with 4,5,6,7 and 8 sides, which makes the puzzle a little more interesting than my previous Slitherlinks, which only use tiles with 4 sides.

You can preview some sample puzzles by downloading this PDF file and printing it.

Thanks to Craig Kaplan for suggesting the use of the Altair tiling.

UPDATE: Here are 100 booklets of these new puzzles. Enjoy!

I am sometimes asked by my art college students for a good book to introduce them to programming, that explains the basic concepts (such as functions and variables) and that is written for creative people, rather than computer science majors.

Unfortunately, the book that worked so well for me is no longer available, nor relevant, since it was the booklet that came with the Timex Sinclair computer (that booklet was remarkably well written!).

Until recently, I had a hard time identifying such a book for my students, but I was recently given a copy of Processing: Creative Coding and Computer Art by Ira Greenberg, and I’m pretty sure this is the book those students are looking for. It’s a book I would have been proud to have written myself.

When painter-turned-pixel-wizard Greenberg describes his experiences, they very much mirror my own, and he spends a lot of time talking about the whys of “code art” as he calls this thing we do, before diving into the hows.

Those of us who delight in making beautiful things with code are in a strange place, and can find it hard to find good reference material and classes. The art colleges consider what we do too technical, and the technical colleges consider what we do too arty. Many of us have fallen into this pursuit of making beautiful algorithms quite accidentally.

For people such as us, the Processing language, covered in this book, is an excellent first choice. It is free, it has a very simple all-in-one programming and execution environment, and it saves all your projects in a kind of sketchbook. The best way to learn this stuff is to make a series of little sketches, one after another, rather than working on a giant magnum opus. Greenberg talks about noodling around with code, while sitting in front of the TV and eating snacks, making pretty pictures, one after another. I heartily approve of this method.

Greenberg is painfully aware that his audience is likely to be quite math phobic, due to the horrible way that math is taught in schools, but having been math phobic himself (as I was), he delights in the wonders and miracles that are in store for those readers who slowly introduce themselves to graphics programming.

The book includes a nice history of computing and code art, which mentions a few of my heros, including Charles Babbage, Grace Hopper and John and James Whitney. It doesn’t assume the reader already knows how to count in hexadecimal, or (as so many books do) already knows another programming language.

There’s a good section up front on the bizarre nomenclature used by programmerrs, and an appendix in the back which covers some key math concepts that the reader may eventually find peace with.

If the book has a fault, it’s that Greenberg is a little to anxious to share some advanced scripts very early in the game, before doing some more basic tutorials. For example, Greenberg’s love of tree images causes him to share a script that uses recursion really early on, before covering much simpler stuff like drawing a few lines. The reader will be well advised to skip over this stuff at first, and take Greenberg’s advice to read the book non-linearly.

I would also recommend it supplementing it with another book on the same subject, such as the Reas and Fry Processing book, so you can obtain alternate descriptions of the same things. When you are first learning this stuff, one book is never enough.

This is my attempt to make some eye candy roughly in the style of James Whitney’s wonderful 1966 movie, Lapis, which can occasionally be spotted on Youtube. If you’re interested in making stuff like this, just remember, it all starts with π.

If you’re a mathophobe, and even the barest mention of π sends you running for the hills, I offer some hope: I too, was once a mathophobe. Your problem lies not with you, nor with math, but with the way you were taught math. The best way to learn math, in my opinion, is to try to make pretty pictures with the help of a computer. At least, that’s what worked for me. Try it!

Update: I modified the movie to use a technique that is closer to Lapis – using a fixed random dot painting as the underlying element.

If you have a myspace account, you’ll want to check out the app I’ve been working on this week, Y! Music Videos.

This OpenSocial app displays a list of music videos, which are selected based on the information you have put in your myspace profile (specifically, your “favorite music”).

So if you’ve listed Beatles and Bjork, as I have, you’ll get some decent videos. And if you’ve listed something you actually like, you’ll get that…

Eventually, when MySpace finishes their OpenSocial implementation (it’s still pretty bare bones), you’ll be able to do more…

New additions to my collection of useless but fun toys for your webcam include the amazing Kaleido Cam, and the uncanny Alien Cam. These are in addition to my already popular Instant Ascii Cam (see previous post), which has received quite a few visitors since I rolled it out this past weekend.

The KaleidoCam is based on code I wrote quite some time ago, but never got around to posting on Krazydad. It turns your webcam into a virtual kaleidoscope (or perhaps more properly, a teleidoscope).

The Alien Cam is new, and does a color keying effect using randomly generated color gradients. Press the ‘zap!’ button to see random colors, until you see an alien you like!

Tonight I’m working on a Flash-based web app that turns your webcam into an ascii cam. If you have a webcam (or a built-in webcam, as on a Mac Book pro), you can play with it here. Bear in mind I’ll be working on it over the weekend, and it may go loopy from time to time.

The ascii cam allows you to take text snapshots which you can paste into your favorite instant messenger.

I made this mosaic today. It’s Gene Simmons, made of kittens.

The photos were recent additions to Flickr that had the tag “kittens”. Not all of them are actually of kittens. There’s a cool photo in the upper middle showing recent “top searches”, and a few burlesque dancers mixed in with the kitties.

My friend Mike Davis pointed out that it makes much more sense to make Peter Criss out of Kittens, and to make Gene Simmons out of demons, but I like the contrast here better. The subject of the mosaic was suggested by my neighbor Brandon Hutchinson, who is a much bigger Kiss fan than I am.

You can see who took the photos on this attributions page, which puts the name of each photographer in a mouse-over label.

People often ask how I make these mosaics. I use a collection of Perl scripts of my own design, which work in conjunction with the ImageMagick library. There is one script to collect lists of photos, another to download thumbnails, and another script to build the actual mosaic image. If you’re interested in these scripts, you’ll find them (or older versions of them, at least) in the code that goes with the book I cowrote, “Flickr Hacks”. However, those of you without elite Perl hacking skillz will do just fine with the various freeware and shareware offerings out there for building Mosaics. Two programs I personally recommend are Andrea Mosaic for the PC, and MacOSaiX, for the Mac. The main reason I insist on re-inventing the wheel with my own mosaic-building software is because I find the process itself fascinating.

I printed out the mosaic on a large format printer so I can decorate my cubicle with it. It looks totally awesome at 50 inches across! It’s interesting how much more impact these mosaics have when reproduced at very large sizes. Up close, the overall Gene Simmons picture vanishes, and you just have a cool collection of cat photos. But if you stand 50 or 100 feet away, it’s all Gene Simmons!

I wish I had a large format printer in my living room… Anyone want to buy me one?

A few folks have asked if I was affected by yesterdays layoffs at Yahoo! The short answer is no but yes. While everyone can’t help but be affected in some way by layoffs, I was not actually laid off, nor was anyone I work with directly.

I’m still slogging away, with far more work than I have hands for, as is the usual case with me, regardless of my employer. I’m looking forward to getting all this distracting business behind us, and getting on with the job of making cool shit.

I thought fellow yahoo Doug Crockford did a perceptive write up about this subject on his blog.