coral
Video Hacker & Multimedia Artist
Over the past months i’ve been active in the ONE HOUR COMPO which is exactly what it sounds like. You have one hour from the start of the compo to make a short song about a new theme. It goes every week and has been going for over 10 years so far.
Here’s a couple of the entries i think turned out well.
This one was for a theme about “Falling”. I played around with ultra long reverb tails a lot.
Theme about a weird arcade machine, this is a cut from the longer compo where i sort of played on the fact that this was OHC 500!
Theme for this one was “Lucid Dream” and i flexed that arpeggiator to the max. Thing i like about this one is the transition from the arpeggiated piano to the synthesizer.
I publish most of the One Hour Compo songs on Soundcloud
When discussing about how we would track the items taken from the bar we came to the conclusion that a normal pen and paper system would work. However what’s the fun in that? Because i find such things boring, i started writing a Swift application that would be able to sit on an iPad in our festival bar. This quickly turned into a question about how we even track the items in the bar, which led me into also writing a Vue.JS app on top of my Go backend that could adminster the transactions. To connect everything together, i decided to use something new for data storage & synchronization. After evaluating a couple of different options, i felt that Google’s new Cloud Firestore would be cool to test as it has good iOS integration together with realtime support for Web and a Golang adapter. On top of this, Firestore actually gives you realtime updates through it’s “snapshot” mechanism which is neat to get for free. I used Vuefire with the latest 2.0 branch to easily get realtime bindings for the Vue app, which again is amazing how easy it all just comes together.
The app works by scanning the festival goers ticket QR code, either from their mobile phone or from the printed stickers.
However, this festival will be outside in the deep Swedish forest in the middle of the night, and while the low light sensitivity on Apple’s cameras are great, complete darkness isn’t really perfect for this. Here i could just have bought a simple flashlight, but what’s the fun in that? I bought an Adafruit Bluefruit Feather coupled with a NeoPixel Featherwing and integrated some Bluetooth into the iOS application itself. This way, the Feather mounted to the back of the iPad provides contextual flashlight + some nice visual cues on the transaction itself, such as sweeping over different colors for different application states.
To help Chips Compo with a better tool for synchronized listenings, i wrote a automated rendering solution that streams it to Twitch.tv. This allows the community to listen to the new tracks every week in an automated fashion and introduces a new audience to the community.
The project is open sourced on Github and runs either in a headless renderer or in the browser source in OBS. I used Agisoft’s scripts to spin up a AWS EC2 cloud instance that runs OBS and renders the compo page every week on a g3 instance.
I sometimes participate in Chips Compo which is a fun site for people that like making weird music every week in the hope of improving somewhat. The community around Chips is just amazing, a bunch of highly talented people of all skill levels helping you improve your skill dramatically. Here’s some tracks i made for Chips.
AMNSI/CH!“#€4- - Chips Compo 17 NAST 2018 - Remix/Cover Compo In Reality - Cacaophony Bonus Round 2
There’s no good explanation to why i made this really. I wanted to pursue the circle concept in motion and i happened to be browsing oriental rugs. The video has an almost constant rotation over the full minute, spanning 360 degrees which creates an unreal drifting downwards. I wanted the feeling of sort of dazing off in your living room, the flow of just watching the sunset in the sofa, listening to music and letting the mind race away. Most of it was made in Cinema4D and rendered using Octane.
The result looks like this:
Somewhere between joking and being serious, a smaller festival in the woods of Anderstorps was created. Serving as a creative outlet without requirements for me, i created a graphical profile, a complete ticket system, web page and related communication material to propel the joke to the border between serious and weird. The third iteration of this mash of ideas is about to happen in July. I’ll post some more about what turned out to be then.
See more at ANDERSTORPSFESTIVALEN.SE
