MediaSlurper - December Updates

Merry Christmas!  It has been years since I've posted stuff here on Christmas Day, but since this is a personal project, this doesn't really count as "work-stuff" (and besides, I haven't been feeling that burned out this year by this time that I need a complete break)

This month, I added a bunch of quality-of-life tweaks to MediaSlurper to address a few issues I'd been increasingly running into, and couldn't delay addressing any more. Oh, and added a cute-as seasonal variant of the mascot, in homage to the VLC icon (which I also adore seeing at this time of year!)

Maybe one day I'll have everything generalised enough to release this tool for others to use too. But in the meantime, it's still only really for my own personal use... Expressions of interest may expedite when I consider making a public release possible...

Happy Chinese New Year 2018 - Year of the Dog

Wishing everyone a productive and joyous Year of the Dog!

Silvereye vs Berry - Slowmo & Regular Speed

Yesterday evening, I caught a plump little silvereye blissfully feasting away on a tasty little yellow berry out the back of the house. Amazingly, I managed to stand there for a few minutes snapping away and recording footage through the gap between the window and the windowframe; it may have helped that the toilet was gurgling away nearby to drown out the clap-clap-clap-clap-clap of the shutter XD (hence why I've replaced the original audio with some more snippets of music from my thesis writing collections).

Here is the footage of the birdie in action. First up is the slowed down version (from 25 fps down to 5 fps):

It's comical watching the birdy chomping, twisting, and tugging away like this.

It's also surprising just how relaxed/serene it all looks when slowed down like this (something I've noticed when stepping through the footage of some earlier clips too) - it's almost like we're finally seeing the world at the speed that the birds actually live/experience it! And to think that I only really noticed this after watching the full-speed clip render out at about this speed and realising just how much more interesting it was to watch when played back this slowly... :D


Now, if you're wondering what it actually looks like at full speed, here's the full-speed version:

It looks a whole lot more frantic eh? (And, just to be clear, I didn't speed up the video... they really do move that quickly in real life!)


As always, these were edited in the Blender Sequencer - I still have the same complaints about ugly quirks in the workflow though :(

(Note to self: I must really get cracking on either adding per-strip blendin/out + better font/text support to the sequencer, OR just bite the bullet and put together my own FFMPEG-based "VIM x Node-Tree" video/audio editor project. If it wasn't for the overhead of setting up a new app structure from scratch and then maintaining it, I get the feeling that the latter would almost invariably end up being a better solution in the long run for my particular needs/workflow)

Epic "Nemo" Tank and Sea Turtles @ Kelly Tarlton's

To kick off 2018, I've just spent a few hours cutting together a bunch of some of the clips I filmed while on vacation up in the North Island earlier this month, pairing the footage with a little taste of the music I recorded last year while in the midst of writing my thesis.



Originally, this was going to be just a video of the clips I'd filmed of an epic "Nemo" tank they had - complete with heaps of Clownfish, Blue Tangs, and Anemones - but to make the clips flow together, and to fit the soundtrack I'd found from my collection, I needed to include a few other clips I'd filmed as well

Hope you enjoy it!  It was fun putting this together with the Blender Sequencer - though it was really sluggish with the HD footage, meaning that I had to rerender it a few dozen times to get the timing of the fades down (though it's perhaps not such a great idea with a laptop on a hot day ;).

Over the coming months, I look forward to gradually releasing more of the 3+ hours of music I recorded/composed last year while writing my thesis (with the backing track here being just the first track of "Album 1" ;)  I'm still working through a plan and the mechanics for doing that, so stay tuned!

March Music - Musescore 2 Experiments

Over the past few weeks, I've been getting quite a lot of interesting melodic snippets popping up at random times (and much more frequently than in the past). So, I've taken to firing up Musescore and jotting them down while they're fresh (and also, since a lot of these just sound so neat when done this way). Plus, earlier in the month, I finally upgraded to version 2.0 at last, which has brought with it a lovely new Soundfont (based on Fluid; I especially love the Piano and Marimba sounds on this; the Flute could still be better on long notes, and I still don't dare to touch any of the Strings as they typically sound dreadful XD); that and the awesome "Continous Mode".

Here are two of the more "complete" pieces I managed to bash out using this (today's one is first, followed by an older one from week or two ago).

Start of Autumn - Music

Here's a bunch of lite tracks I recorded this afternoon - the first weekend of Autumn here (sob). It's been a sunny (if mild) day, though it's clear that Summer has ended...



My favourite is the second one (especially that light rhythm in the background), as it echoes some of the cool music out there in various non-Western-classical music traditions (i.e. all the very cool stuff)

PS.  After a few long weeks, I've finally finished data collection on my last experiment for my thesis. Yay!

Happy Chinese New Year 2017 - The Year of the Chicken!

"Regal" - Orchestral Tune

One morning, a melody came to me while having breakfast, so I spent a few minutes transcribing it. The whole thing kindof snowballed however once I realised that the French Horn can't actually play some of the higher notes I'd been building up to, hence the introduction of additional instruments, leading to horn + trumpet + strings (vln 1, vln 2, vla)  + flute  (added in that order).  Apart from the crappy quality of the synthesizer (blame the MuseScore folks :P), the following clip captures what I set out to achieve that morning quite well I think (plus, it turned out quite nice too IMO :)

Violin Layering Highlights - January 2017

Over the past few weeks, I've continued playing around with my "Violin Layering" series of improvised recordings. Here is a collection of some of the highlights from this month. Hope you enjoy :)

Voice Controlled AI Devices - A Reaction Post

In response to the article about voice-controlled boxes being activated by a news item about how a kid managed to buy a dollhouse + cookies off Amazon via the voice control.

Interpreting sound has never been an easy thing. Not for humans, and definitely not for computers! If you actually think about it, it's not that hard to imagine how hard it is for a computer to understand speech and sounds. For example:
   * How many times have you had trouble understanding someone's accent? Or had a misunderstanding because you misheard someone's muffled speech over a noisy/muffled/faint/crackling/unreliable phone?  Well, guess what, for a computer doing voice recognition, the only input it's got is the sound coming in from the microphone... which of course is mixed in with everything else going on sonically in that environment (e.g. TV's, smartphones, gaming consoles, music players, rangehoods, kitchen equipment, aircon, running taps, open windows/traffic-noise/neighbours, bickering flatmates, etc.). And that's not to mention that the users may be out of range of the microphone, or the microphones may be cheap trash bought for bargin basement prices, and have been wired backwards...

   * How many times have you been watching a film or tv show, and found yourself lurching for the fire escape as a siren sounded on screen? Or reached for your phone, only to realise that it wasn't your phone ringing, but that of the lady at the next table? Or perhaps you've responded to someone calling your name, only to find that a stranger had been calling another stranger, and not you (the now slightly embarrassed sucker trying to pretend that you didn't just not-answer to your name). Clearly, even us humans get it wrong quite often, but at least we often have the benefit of *context*, the ability to use our other senses to diambiguated the situation, and a few other "on-the-fly" techniques. (This probably goes some way towards explaining why there's a reason that people like me really don't like answering phonecalls or having to call people on the phone...). Anyways, if it's hard for us humans to get this stuff right, expect the computers to have an even harder time to disambiguate all of this!


Inspired by all this, I wondered what a "day in the life" of one of these voice recognition boxes would be, when deployed in a domestic environment that's not kindof far from the "idealised model-human" fantasy that designers often find themselves falling back to... The answer was that it would feel like they were a lost and isolated operative thrust into a war zone - "hostile enemy territory"...

2017 Kickoff - Holiday Inspirations

We're a week into the new year now, and as most of us return to work from our holidays, I'd like to mention a bunch of interesting stuff I came across in the second half of my holiday (i.e. the stuff that came after alternating between lounging around like a vegetable and running around going to exotic locations for fun). I've gotta say, it's been great having a break!

Horn Theme

And now for something different... a little horn theme I came up with this morning. Probably indirectly inspired by some similar bits and pieces from a John Williams score or from one of the cues from Thomas Newman's Bridge of Spies score.



Disclaimer: Any similarity to any of the aforementioned scores or anything else is entirely coincidental.

Violin Improv - Moody/Atmospheric Tracks

Today's latest set of tracks:


It's been a while since I've had a chance to have some fun and do this (between being sick and catching up on all the work I'd had to put aside during that time). Once again, everything is just me improvising each track by overdubbing them a few times. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this set turned out - they turned out quite thematically similar (apart from the last one, which was an interesting exercise in seeing what sort of random special fx I could come up with).

Violin Layering Songs - 20160730

Here's another bunch of songs I recorded for fun (and a break from "work-like" things) this afternoon.



This time, I tried to keep things a lot more "tonal" than in previous recordings, so hopefully more people will find it less unsettling to listen to. Another thing I was playing around with here was tweaking the left/right balance and relative volume levels of each track (apologies in advance if one or two are a bit on the "loud" side) - I ended up optimising for headphones (tracks "8" and "3" in particular really sound a lot better this way; in particular, "3" only seems understandable this way).

My personal favourite of this set is the first one on the playlist ("8 - Horse Riding"). While there may have been a few places where the timing isn't quite perfect enough, the overall effect is quite nice, and really gives off that equine "galloping" feel to it :)

The Sea - Music inspired by a visit to the beach

It's taken a few weeks to get around to it, but I've finally gotten around to uploading the set of tracks I recorded for use as a soundtrack to a bunch of clips I filmed while spending some time out at Sumner beach watching the waves. You can see one of those clips (a real-life homage and fan-art for Pixar's "Piper") and the track I specially recorded for it here.



It was really relaxing spending time just staring out at the waves as them came crashing in to the shoreline. While the picture above shows the tides as they started to recede, they were initially much higher, and would come in thick and fast.

Seagulls vs Waves Clip

Keeping with the theme of "fan-art" of sorts, here's a little video I put together from footage I shot while out a Sumner beach on Saturday afternoon...



From the video's description:

A pair of seagulls hunting for food along Sumner Beach, between the receding tides. Filmed yesterday during a relaxing stroll along the shoreline out at Sumner, after a great lunch. The sea yesterday looked as I've never seen it - the water level was really high, and the waves just kept coming in thick and fast.

The scene reminded me a lot of Pixar's amazing short film "Piper" (showing in front of Finding Dory). It's one of my absolute favourite shorts! Great story, wonderful animation, amazing rendering, and OMG cuteness overload!

While this shaky phone-cam (at reduced resolution to save disk space) doesn't hold a candle to that, this clip is still very much in the same spirit!

The soundtrack here is a little track I recorded specially for this footage. It's done using the "Violin Layering" techniques I've been playing around over the past month of so - basically, I recorded the first pass of the music watching the video (via my phone), and then worked on recording extra tracks for it while keeping in mind the general mood I was going for (in addition to the key beats of the clip). It's not quite 100% there yet, but as a first attempt at doing this, I'm overall happy with the results!

Mid-Week Doodle - Blurry Tree-Lined Path at Night

Another little doodle/painting session to relax a bit, inspired by the experiments I'd been doing this autumn with deliberately defocussing my lenses to get an optimal "painterly bokeh" look. (Long-time followers of this blog may also remember that a few years ago when learning how to use GLSL, I mused about developing a "disk splatting" technique for rendering bokeh-filled scenes; this was basically another attempt at achieving similar results, except in the real world ;)

This image started by being just an attempt to test the "disk splatting" blurry-tree technique I'd been interested in trying (especially after accidentally "discovering" a way to achieve that look in Krita using a particular circular brush, playing around with different combinations of Opacity + Size settings). However, seeing the result and feeling that the result still somehow lacked a bit of the "oomph" the foliage needed, but not being able to quite pinpoint it, I started blocking in some background (in the hope that it might help), and before long, I'd ended up with this scene.

It is partially drawn from somewhat idealised memories of the annual Lantern Festival in Hagley Park (this particular setting is a bit closer to this year's layout, leading to the area where they had the fireworks). However, it is probably influenced more by the beautiful work of Leonid Afremov - he's one of my favourite painters, with his unique style chunky blocks of bold + vibrant colours, which he paints by using a little triangular knife to scrape lumps of oil-based paint onto the canvas. In that case, I guess you can probably consider this an example of some crappy "fan art" of sorts ;)

Sunday Afternoon Doodle (+ Additional Music Mashup)

Just a random doodle on a cold and dreary Sunday afternoon, playing around with Krita's Multibrush tool... It's quite bizarre using this tool, yet sometimes, you can get some funky effects (like the middle bit, which was quite captivating to draw).

Violin Layering Experiments - 20160706

Earlier today, I had another fun session playing around with making overdubbed violin recordings. This time, I was mainly playing around with the order in which I recorded the tracks (e.g. "3 - Delicate" and "5 - The Last Moose" had the melody line recorded first, while "D-F-A" was an experiment in layering things up with layers hovering around each of the notes in a standard D-minor chord). The result is a set of pieces that I've found are quite nice for listening to while working, especially when played in the order I created the playlist in (hopefully it appears the same for everyone else... for reference, it's: 3, 4, 7, 1, 2, 5, 6)



Some of the dissonance in the tracks is still a bit unsettling (I'm working on it! It's getting better in general I think) and as a result may not be everyone's cup of tea, though on the whole, I'm again quite pleased with these tracks :)

Violin Layering Experiments - 20160629

Today, I played around with some more "layered" recording. Here are some of the better results:







This time, I nailed down my tech setup a lot better - laptop lid up (to not muffle the sound - I usually keep it closed nowadays as I exclusively use the external monitor), and headphones on for playback (it turns out I need to fully extend the cord and to actually have the band flat on top of my head to get the cords out of the way). As a result, there's a lot less "bad noise". Judging from these clips, I might be getting the hang of this... then again, you haven't heard the rejects instead :P

One of the biggest challenges still is keeping track of all the other "sync points" in the other tracks to avoid creating some nasty muddy/confused/out-of-sync clusters that just sound horrid and messy. It's particularly bad once the track count starts ramping up and it's no longer possible to show everything on screen at once. Maybe that'll be the next little "fun hacking experiment" :)