Here’s a new coverpop I just made of 1512 of the most popular (according to various criteria) videos on YouTube™.

The videos are arranged horizontally by the date they were uploaded, and vertically by the color of the thumbnail. Mouse over a thumbnail to see more info about the video. Click to play the video in a pop-up window (you may need to bypass pop-up detection for this to work).

Enjoy!

After watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Here is my report.

Mark Sloan’s Wild Weird and Wonderful, The American Circus 1901-1927 is my favorite book of the bunch. This is a large coffee-table book containing a collection of amazing photographs taken by F.W. Glasier, a commercial portrait photographer who photographed all the circuses that came through northern Massachusetts for the first third of the twentieth century. Glasier is not a well known photographer, and his photographs do not appear to be available online.

Opening this book made my jaw drop. There are two-page spreads that show panoramic views of huge circuses unloading from trains, with endless queues of elephants. Incredible portraits of animal handlers, troops of period clowns, freaks and coochie girls. The photographs are printed large enough that you can just get lost in them, and there is an amazing amount of period detail lurking in the corners.

A.W. Stencell’s Seeing is Believing, America’s Sideshows is the second standout book in the group. The author of this book is a 40 year veteran of the carnival and circus business. He writes about the lost art of sideshows, the entertainments which once were the mainstay of the midway, but which gradually supplanted by thrill rides in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The book is generously illustrated, telling and illustrating the origins and development of all different kinds of shows, from ten-in-ones, to faked devil fish, animal shows, peep shows, torture shows, crime shows, motorcycle stunts, monkey races, minstrel shows, and pickled punks, to name just a few.

Stencell omits the Coochie and Burlesque shows, which he covers in his other book Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind, which sounds excellent as well.

Janet M. Davis’s The Circus Age, Culture & Society Under the American Big Top is, as it’s title and publisher (the University of North Carolina) would suggest, a more academic look at the influence of the American Circuses on popular culture. There are not too many illustrations, but the text is well researched and thoughtful, covering such issues and class and gender.

Francine Hornberger, the author of Carny Folk, The World’s Weirdest Sideshow Acts reveals in the introduction that she was inspired to research the subject after watching HBO’s Carnivale (just as I was). The book is a compendium of performers, mostly famous freaks, such as Johnny Eck and Cheng and Eng Bunker. It is cheaply printed, and the illustrations did not reproduce particularly well. Much of this information is available elsewhere, in similar books.

UPDATE: Lily pointed me to some very cool photos by Mark Ellen Mark, of Indian, Mexican and Vietnamese circuses (Circi?)

This weekend, after adding stereo support to my software synthesizer, JSyd, I added three new stereo variations to the Whitney Music Box. These are fun to watch and listen to with headphones.

Variation 14

Variation 15

Variation 16

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 free audio programs for use in my upcoming Art Center class “Digital Audio and Sound Effects,” for High School kids. My base criteria for the software used in this class is that it must be free (or in beta, or demoware) and it must work on both PCs and Macs.

Some of my favorites:

Audacity, a free audio editor.

JSyd, my own software synthesis program.

Plogue Bidule, an audio and MIDI processing app, especially useful for live performance.

Rebirth, Propellerhead’s retro-synthesis program is now free (but doesn’t work so hot on Mac OSX compatible).

Know any other good ones? Let me know. I’d like to find a free program that does decent TFFT displays (spectral changes over time). WavePad does this well, but is PC only.

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 to generate many of the more interesting music variations in my Whitney Music Box (especially those involving harmonics and microtones).

The new version, written in Java, is called JSyd. It runs on Macs, Linux boxes and Windows. You can download a beta version of it here, and read the (sparse) documentation here.

Here’s a screen shot.

Here are some sample sounds produced with Syd:

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Sample 4

If you are on a Macintosh or Linux box, I’d be particularly interested in getting your feedback & bug reports. Thanks!

UPDATE: My coverpop website has been having some power-related outages today – I’ve temporarily moved the Syd files to a different location.

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 doing some very cool stuff, only hinted at in the presets.

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 I’ll add it to the list.

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 from old electronics junk, at 7pm.

Come join us for the performance at 7 pm! I hope to provide some MIDI-powered circular goodness.

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.