We are back from FITC Amsterdam, and it was, as usual, a really great time.
While in Amsterdam, Almer/Blank debuted Synthia, the first publicly usable musical instrument to emerge from Project Ludi at Almer/Blank Labs.
Synthia, on the web, is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music — infinite classical canons — using a small set of rules that establish key, restricted notes within the key, tempo, instrumentation and the score. Synthia was actually developed as a demonstration app to accompany R Blank’s talk, ‘Hearing Pictures’, but the results were so fun to play with, that we decided to make it a publicly usable web-application, where anyone can upload any picture, have Synthia turn it into music, and then share it with your friends and embed it in any web page.
We will be posting a lot more about Synthia in the coming weeks, and updating her rules and features over the coming months. But, for now, I’d encourage all of you to play around with the Synthia Composer (just upload an image and listen), or just browse the gallery to hear what other pictures sound like.
And, if while playing with Synthia, you have some ideas on how we might commercialize her, share your thoughts and ideas and have a chance to win an iPad.
As I write this, I’m also packing up to head off to Amsterdam in the morning, to debut Synthia at FITC Amsterdam, so I will unfortunately have to be brief.
I will be posting more information in the coming weeks, as we, at Almer/Blank Labs continue plugging away, refining Synthia and adding more features to the site.
Some of you may have checked out the courses I posted over on the Adobe Developer Connection on building progressive and streaming video players with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).
Unfortunately, even those courses are relatively new, the code in them no longer works, because OSMF has advanced a few sprints. We’re now at OSMF sprint 9, and the framework continues to shift quite a bit.
Because there are almost no examples on the web of using OSMF with Flash (as opposed to Flex), and I’ve had several people email me asking if I had time to update the code.
It’s 35 minutes across five lessons and takes you through the process of converting the progressive OSMF video player (which we create in the first installment of this course on Building Progressive Video Players with Adobe OSMF, into a dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player. Multi-bitrate streaming occurs when you program your Flash to deliver the highest quality video a viewer can see (dependent on their bandwidth). *Dynamic* multi-bitrate streaming is similar, with the additional feature of having your player constantly meters the bandwidth throughout viewing, to adjust the playback between multiple videos seamlessly, as the viewer’s bandwidth may fluctuate. …read more…
I’ve just publicly released the first available output from the Synesthesizer — a side-project, executed in Flash, that translates pictures into music. The Synesthesizer is the first tangible product of Project Ludi, an internal skunkworks project here at Almer/Blank, the goal of which is to translate any type of media into any other type of media.
The Synesthesizer is a Flash 10 musical synthesizer that relies on synesthesia-inspired translation metaphors.
