Alec Albright – Looking Outwards – 12

“Skataviz” (2012) by Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille and “Music Animation Machine” (2013) by Stephen Malinowski are two very different yet interesting projects that could serve as inspiration for my final project. The first, “Skataviz”, is a live motion detection program that visualizes the path of a skateboard as it travels in real time. This is admirable because it finely tracks the orientation of the board and is able to focus on only the subject’s board at any given time. However, it seems to overlook the potential use of these mappings. Instead, it simply displays the mapping rather than generating new innovative works from it.

The second project is more focused on demonstrating the cadence and dynamics of music through a computer visualization. This is different from “Skataviz” in that it does not do this in real time. Rather, it takes a musical score as an input and generates a visualization that is traversed in a rhythmical pattern specified by the user. This is admirable because of the way it is able to sync up with instrumental performance as well, as demonstrated in the video. Unlike “Skataviz”, this seems to overlook any real-time processing that, though computationally complex, could move as a function of the sound being produced by the performer.