The Best Way to Watch Music

Really neat links and commentary from BH and ER:

 

*

Cool, very cool. I recently read an article posted on OReilly Radar: Magnetosphere: The Best Way to Watch Music.

 

 

 

Boston's Barbarian Group has released their first piece of software, a music visualizer for iTunes. Magnetosphere's one of the most responsive and beautiful visualizers that I've seen. It is available for iTunes on Mac and Windows.

The Barbarians, best-known for creating the Subservient Chicken, developed Magnetosphere in Processing and then ported it line-by-line to C++. Processing, first mentioned on Radar in 2005, is a Java-based language that is designed to create animations. The Open Source language is released under the GNU GPL. The early prototypes for the Trulia Hindsight Map (Radar post) were done in Processing. Some of the other things that we've blogged about previously that have processing include: Mobzombies and the Open Street Map visuals.

 

You can see more Processing experimentation on Flight404, the Magnetosphere creator's blog.

 

*

 

While I was researching Joshua Davis material last night, I stumbled upon a link to this site, apparently early cohorts in genius.  I love this stuff.

 

http://www.flight404.com/blog/

 

FYI: Check out the Archive Version 4, drag the white square around the plane outline and click on the passenger seats to activate a new “creature”.  

 

Also, on www.joshuadavis.com I noticed that his Praystations have A LOT of code and zip files that you can download to learn Actionscript.  (I think this would be AS1 though as it was circa 2000 – 2001)