Location
Rochester, NY, USA
External Link
Contact
keithhandy at gmail dot com
Bio
My creative background is predominantly musical. I’ve always to some extent been interested in incorporated “mathy” and otherwise experimental systems in my compositions and arrangements, generally not as the main focus but in supporting contexts. For example:
- As a teen in the late ‘80s I programmed my Commodore 64 to play a rhythmic bed of randomly pitched staccato 32nd notes for use in Mana. (I’ve resurrected this recently using an emulator, which you can hear on my website.)
- Cheap Thrills modulates by a different interval at the same spot in each of 12 iterations of its chord progression.
- Slab of Clay featured rhythmic muting and unmuting of a sound effect collage on a looped casssette, enhanced with alternating forward and reversed delays.
- One untitled piano improvisation of mine took on a totally different “mood” by having its range of notes completely flipped upside down in Cakewalk.
- The entire chord progression to Happy Birthday Pump Prototype is derived from a familiar melody, stretched to four minutes.
- I’ve coded self-mutating drum patterns in Cakewalk’s lisp-like CAL scripting language.
In more recent years, I’ve been exploring ways to create visual images that would complement my musical style, hoping to merge the organic look of hand-made animation with the musical awareness of visualization software. In my quest for an original look, I’ve been programming in C++ to develop my own method of generating images that communicate visually what I “see” in music. The images can be animated, but take a long time to render, so they would not be suitable for real-time.
Four of these images can be seen closer up here.
The images are built up from layers, and each layer is defined as a set of anchor points; the closer you are to an anchor point, the greater weight is given to that point’s color. This is complicated a little by each anchor having an “array of influence” around it – more influence in some directions, less influence in others.
A layer by itself is just a blur without any defined edges; that happens when the layers are combined. Each pixel holds a “contest” to see which layer shows. My favorite rule has been to select the layer with the lowest color saturation. The edges and well-defined shapes emerge as a result of this contest, and are anti-aliased by holding multiple sub-pixel contests near the edges and averaging the results.
Since I last uploaded the above pictures, I’ve added noise and transparency as well.
Thoughts on "Generative Art"
In the course of doing anything creative, you spend hours and hours staring at whatever you’re drawing, or listening to your song over and over again. The brain creates a sort of ‘afterimage’, so that after a period of time you can’t properly see or hear what you’re doing, only what you’re adding to it. The reason I like generative processes is not because of any high concept or principle – it’s because by separating process from end result, you can actually see your own work with fresh eyes. Also, when your process involves a computer, it’s like a bizarre form of collaboration, which is interesting in itself.
Neither Visual Nor Musical
I can’t do a whole page on generative stuff without mentioning Hal Whippy, an irc bot that makes random word substitutions … more to be added …
Licenses
- All still images on this page are under the Creative Commons: Attribution license. Though not required by the license, the author would appreciate any feedback on material used.
- All music linked to is under the Creative Commons: Music Sharing license unless specified otherwise.