Post-Modern Poster Child (Musical Typewriter Mix) from lee-sean on Vimeo.
I presented my final project for Intro to Computational Media today. Building on the work I did with the Musical Typewriter, I ended up making some last minute tweaks to my “musical typeface,” which consists of audio samples corresponding to each letter of the alphabet. Originally I had used all single-hit percussion sounds, but I reworked the alphabet to include short musical phrases or gestures, and brought in wind and string instrument samples for greater musicality and richness. The final version of my Processing program reads a text file and “translates” the text into music by playing back the samples corresponding to the letters of the words as musical phrase “cluster.”
While playing back a text as a song, the Processing sketch also simultaneously displays the word corresponding to the musical sample cluster being played and visualizes the frequency waves of the music on the screen. Refer to the screenshot above.
For my in-class performance, I used the lyrics to the HEPNOVA track Post-Modern Poster Child and reinterpreted words through the Musical Typewriter. [MP3] [AIFF]
During my presentation, I also Rick Rolled the class with Rick Astley’s immortal lyrics played through my program.
Source code after the jump.