The basic idea of the framework is to provide some conventions for making compositional code modular and reusable. There are some other features that I am interested in developing further as well such as a MVC-like interaction between raw “aesthetic data” and the instruments/performers in a musical piece.

For more info, check out the KnacK project page².

It is a collaborative web-based application for creating music with others in an intuitive way.

I would love to enhance this application in the future by making the sound and interactions much more interesting and applicable to a touchscreen interface.

You can read more about it, and see a short video of it in action on the tulpasynth page².

I have been studying technology for longer than many have. I have been personally affected by the consequences of changes in technology. I have spent the past four years, and will be spending the next two working towards educating myself so I can influence technology that affects me the most in a positive way. I witnessed iPod mania among my peers from its birth, and have seen the effects this has had on common perception about the worth of music, and purchasing vs. pirating.

From my perspective, the “SOPA” situation is as follows:

• Technology is moving forward, and will always be moving forward.
• The high-grossing media distribution industry is built around distribution of physical medium, which is no longer relevant due to automated/far-reaching electronic medium distribution systems like iTunes, or a musician’s/record label’s own online retail store.
• Therefore, the high-grossing music distribution industry is no longer relevant.

This may be difficult for one to hear, especially if she/he has made a living/put children through college/gotten filthy rich using some of the profits of this industry. Yes, this is a tough place to be. It is a sad state of affairs when technology makes jobs obsolete, and the solution is not always clear. What is clear to me, however, is that what SOPA proposes is not the solution to this problem. Therefore, I can only assume that it is because of the money/power that this industry has in politics that SOPA is moving forward.

In terms of the problem the bill states it is solving, combating online piracy, I have a suggestion that I think is better than what SOPA proposes. Censoring the internet, deleting DNS records, etc. seems like an incredibly roundabout solution to a straightforward problem. I picture this solution as merely trimming the problem from the surface, instead of taking it out from its roots. Not only is the SOPA solution shortsighted, but by definition it has the potential to stunt general innovation. What I think would solve this issue is an incredibly simple and unobtrusive form of DRM.

The DRM system I imagine can work similar to what I hear Amazon’s kindle books work like, minus the digital distribution of the media. This system could be managed by the government, implemented by the government, etc., and would consist of an open API to track consumers’ digital media purposes. Instead of the government mandating that all websites abide by arbitrary requests, they could mandate that any sites distributing digital media interface with this API. This would be a straightforward way to ensure that consumers are only downloading media that they have the rights to, and would provide a clear criteria for an “infringing site”.

Consumers could also be provided with some control over their catalog of purchases, and could “loan” ownership of their items over to someone else.

Clearly I am glossing over some details here, but I think even at an abstract level, this concept seems more reasonable than allowing the government to choose which sites are “infringing”.

Sources:

• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/26/141659992/occupy-wall-streets-most-unlikely-ally-the-pope
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/22/141619672/finding-common-ground-between-two-movements
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141521155/how-are-business-impacted-by-occupy-wall-street
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141411367/g-20-countries-meet
• http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/05/141048592/occupy-wall-street-where-everybody-has-a-say-in-everything
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/27/141733449/protests-pick-up-steam-will-obama-get-burned
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/28/141787999/occupy-violence-reignites-criticism-of-oakland-police
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/21/141578814/the-last-word-in-business
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/30/141768287/nprs-hard-times-series-reporters-begin-journey
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141427331/op-ed-occupy-wall-street-protesters-goals
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/27/141748016/cities-vary-widely-in-response-to-occupy-camps
• http://www.npr.org/2011/10/27/141761857/mayor-on-shutting-down-occupy-atlanta

Briefly, for anyone who has not studied models of computation, the basic idea is that there are different types of theoretical computers (i.e. models of computation) and there are different sets of problems that each of them can solve. For example, a computerized soda vending machine can solve a much smaller set of problems than the computer you are using right now. Analogously, the computer you are using right now cannot solve certain problems, and thus (theoretically), it is only a matter of time before we have solved all that we can, and until then we are simply “filling in the gaps”, as Amy puts it.

This has never bothered me. I have known that we are just “filling in the gaps” for some time, but it was only until I discussed the idea with Amy that I gained some practical insight into what it meant for me. If you’re still reading, bear with me while I depart for a bit.

I have been interested in audio and music technology for as long as I can remember. My goal is to try to make a living while filling in the gaps in technology that I want to see filled, which will in turn allow artists like myself to be more productive, and open new opportunities to create beautiful things. Of course, I’d like to have fun doing it as well, but that is for another discussion .

For the past few years, I have been learning about new technologies and about opportunities for collaborative audio/music applications on this great new platform we call the web. Considering the web in the grand scheme of computing with respect to the philosophical issue described above, of course no one knows where it will end up, but I find myself wondering if there will be very many problems left to solve in the near future. I have only lived in the bay area for a little over a month now, and have already met a handful of people who are working on a “collaborative shopping cart”, or a “collaborative text editor”, or a “collaborative audio organizational tool ”. When most apps are made into their “collaborative” counterparts, and there is a multitude of distributed computing frameworks in existence, what will be left for the web?

Accompanied by my staying up-to-date with the evolution of the web, I have taken up an interest in open web standards and the process/people involved in taking on this challenge. I have come to learn that there is a well-known tension in the Computer Science industry between the standards themselves and how they are actually implemented by vendors. The most recent “gossip” on this subject is the Google Dart controversy.

Again for the non-computer-scientist, the idea here is that if you have a lot of money for development, you can take the time to create a level of abstraction over the standard ways of doing things if you think the standards suck. This allows your teams to build things easier/more reliably, and at the end your code gets translated into the standards-compliant code which you never have to look at.

Fortunately, many people with these sorts of resources (and many without) are working to improve the standards and make them much more useful in the real world. Unfortunately, since this process is unavoidably so slow, the stereotypical developer ends up fawning over any small enhancement to these specifications that may make their lives easier. I know because I do this too, it can be fun , but I think that most of the time it is short-sighted, tunnel-vision fawning, which is an issue.

Instead of getting excited and anticipating the support of HTML5 native date fields in iOS, I think if developers instead directed their excitement and anticipation on what we can do to fundamentally move the web platform forward, the evolution of the web may happen at a faster rate. Alex Russell said it best in <= 140 characters:

“The world needs fewer complacent followers of web standards dogma and more directed inquiry into why they all suck so hard.”
- @slightlylate

Why are there multiple standards for changing the way things look on the web? Why do I have to know what “HTTP request”, “Facebook API”, “Cross-site request”, and “JSON” all mean just to get a user’s name when she/he on my site, when he/she has undoubtedly already entered their name 1000 times all over the web? Why can’t my mother translate her extensive graphic design skill to creating web sites easily?

These are the kinds of questions I think Developers should be asking if we are really interested in advancing this platform and potentially computing in general. More people in the trenches could be discussing technology at a higher level and deciding how *they* want it to progress.

After all, it may be only a matter of time until the web doesn’t need anymore development

For the past 4 years I have studied Computer Science, web development, and a bit of the intersection of these fields with music/audio technology. What I am interested in currently is the emerging potential that I see for web-based collaborative audio and music applications. I hope to make a contribution that will strengthen or expand this intersection and that is currently what I am working towards.

For some interesting readings in this area, see Mozilla’s proposed Audio Data API, and the W3C Audio Group‘s Web Audio API.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me along my way.

The application I’ve developed is published at bingo-board.org. It allows for anyone to set up a bingo board and to use a web browser to “call” the numbers, while other web browsers are watching the board.

We used this at my family’s party this past New Year’s and it worked out quite well. I connected a computer to the television in the living room and set up a laptop in the dining room which both displayed the board of numbers in the browser window. My father, who enjoys calling the bingo numbers, used a small laptop to click on the numbers as he called them.

The software is running on Google’s App Engine, which allows for immediate scalability should the Bingo Association of Great Britain start using it or something. It is written using Django, in particular, django-nonrel which allows for the Django application to be run on GAE. On top of Django is django-tastypie, which creates a REST interface for the application. On the frontend, I am using Backbone.js (my new love), and CSS3. You can read more about the CSS3 techniques that I experimented with for this application here.

There are some issues with the software that I hope to resolve before next year, if you are interested in the project it is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/colinsullivan/bingo-board.

You can read more about the application itself here and here.

Here is a video of the effects as they currently stand. You can see that when a number is called, it animates and then continues to animate until another is called.

What is happening is pretty awesome. Each “bingo marker” has a .disabled class initially:

.bingo_marker.disabled {
    opacity: 0.4;
    background: #BAB49D;
    border: none;
    -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}

If a marker has been called, it will have an .enabled class on it:

.bingo_marker.enabled {
    -webkit-animation-name: bounceEnable;
    -webkit-animation-duration: .25s;
    -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#3D4C42), color-stop(0.3, #3D4C42), to(black));
    border: 1px solid white;
    opacity: 1;
}

@-webkit-keyframes 'bounceEnable' {
    from {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1);
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
    }
    33% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1.5);
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;

    }
    66% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(.75);
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
    }
    75% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1.10);
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
    }
    to {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1);
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
    }
}

The animation here is the quick initial bounce when a number is activated (most visible above when a marker turns from red to black). This is achieved by a simple keyframe animation on the scale attribute of the element. Before I discovered scale, I tried animating all of the attributes including font-size a while back which didn’t work out so well.

The last animation that is visible in the video is the long, repeating bounce for whichever marker is the last enabled. For this, like all of the above animations, I just add a class, lastEnabled:

.bingo_marker.lastEnabled {
    background: -webkit-gradient(
        linear, 0% 100%, 0% 0%,
        from(#FF0000),
        color-stop(0.4, #FF0000),
        to(#FF7D7F));
    -webkit-animation-name: lastEnabled;
    -webkit-animation-duration: 2.25s;
    -webkit-animation-direction: normal;
    -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
    z-index: 102;
}

@-webkit-keyframes 'lastEnabled' {
    from {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1);
    }
    10% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1.5);

    }
    20% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(.75);
    }
    30% {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1.30);
    }
    to {
        -webkit-transform: scale(1);
    }
}

As you can see, this class merely changes the color of the marker and begins a repeating animation, once again on the scale attribute.

Another animation that I experimented with, but ended up removing, was the following:

This effect was quite fun to figure out how to achieve, although it may not look all that pleasing. I wanted to figure out how to move that “caution tape” looking background without using any images. In order to create the “caution tape” look, I wrote a little SVG that generates these diagonal stripes:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="200" height="100">
  <g style="fill-opacity:1;fill: #FFFF00;" transform="rotate(-45 50 50)">
    <rect x="-50%" y="-20%" height="5%" width="150%" />
    <rect x="-50%" y="-10%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="0" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="10%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="20%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="30%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="40%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="50%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="60%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="70%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="80%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="90%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="100%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="110%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="120%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="130%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="140%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="150%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="160%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="170%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
    <rect x="-50%" y="180%" height="5%" width="150%"/>
  </g>
</svg>

These stripes are then loaded into that “background” element as the background-image:

#last_enabled_background {
    background: black;
    background-image: url(../svg/stripes.svg);
    background-repeat: repeat;
    ...
}

Since the bars are already at a diagonal, all I need to do now is move them continuously:

#last_enabled_background {
    -webkit-animation-name: moveBorder;
    -webkit-animation-duration: 10s;
    -webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
    -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
    -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}
@-webkit-keyframes 'moveBorder' {
    from {
        background-position: 0% 0%;
    }
    50% {
        background-position: 100% 0%;
    }
    to {
        background-position: 0% 0%;
    }
}

Which worked great

If anyone feels strongly about the development of the interface for bingo-board.org, please feel free to contact me on GitHub: https://github.com/colinsullivan/bingo-board.

Here is my recent work on this piece, I hope you enjoy listening to it and reading about my process. There are many aspects that I would like to explore in the future but these are my findings thus far.

An Exploration of Algorithmic Composition via the Fibonacci Sequence (.pdf)
A brief exploration of the history and theory behind algorithmic music composition and a discussion of the details of my own composition where I utilized the Fibonacci sequence.

An Exploration of Algorithmic Composition: Technical Details (.pdf)
In this short paper I discuss the various technologies I have used in the development of this piece and how each of these tools helped with the development of the composition.